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AMERICAN PROBLEMS 



RECENT BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



Psychology and Life, Boston, 1899 

Grundziige der Psychologic, Leipzig, 1900 

American Traits, Boston, 1902 

Die Amerikaner, Berlin, 1904 

Principles of Art Education, New York, 1905 

The Eternal Life, Boston, 1905 

Science and Idealism, Boston, 1906 

Philosophic der Werte, Leipzig, 1907 

On the Witness Stand, New York, 1908 

Aus Deutsch-Amerika, Berlin, 1908 

The Eternal Values, Boston, 1909 

Psychotherapy, New York, 1909 

Psychology and the Teacher, New York, 1909 



AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

FROM THE POINT OF VIEW 
OF A PSYCHOLOGIST 



BY 



HUGO MUNSTERBERG 




NEW YORK 

MOFFAT, YAKD AND COMPANY 
1910 






Copyright, 1910, by 
MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 

Nbw York 

All Bights Reserved 
Published, April, 1910 



€n!.A:>G:i798 



TO 

FEIEDRICH SCHMIDT 

A MASTER-BUILDER 

OF 

GERMAN-AMERICAN FRIENDSHIP 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 

I. THE FEAR OF NERVES 



II. THE CHOICE OF A VOCATION . 

III. THE STANDING OF SCHOLARSHIP 

IV. PROHIBITION AND TEMPERANCE 
V. THE INTEMPERANCE OF WOMEN 

VI. MY FRIENDS, THE SPIRITUALISTS 

VII. THE MARKET AND PSYCHOLOGY 

VIII. BOOKS AND BOOKSTORES . 

IX. THE WORLD LANGUAGE 



PAGE 
1 

25 

47 
67 
103 
117 
151 
177 
195 



PREFACE 

American problems have tempted me to enter into 
public discussion ever since I became a guest in this 
hospitable land. But naturally the point of view has 
shifted somewhat. The first Instinctive impulse was to 
compare the new impressions with those to which I was 
accustomed, and thus to measure American Institutions by- 
German standards. It was the newcomer's point of view 
from which I wrote my " American Traits." But while 
the aim of that book was to bring German Ideals nearer 
to the American public, my deepest Interest In American 
problems soon led to the opposite effort. I tried to show 
American work and American Ideals to the Germans. 
This time my purpose was to give a systematic view of 
the American people. The book was written In German 
and later was translated Into English under the title 
*'The Americans." 

But In the meantime I have become one of them. 
While I have remained a German citizen, I naturally 
have accepted the American point of view more and more. 
Impressions which at first struck me as strange slowly 
have become a matter of course. My Interest In Ameri- 
can problems has not decreased on this account, but the 
angle from which I see them has become a new one. It 
is no longer the national difference but more my profes- 



AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

sional lifework which has influenced my attitude toward 
the public questions. Not as a German but as a psy- 
chologist I have begun to take sides as to problems which 
stir the nation. 

In this spirit the following essays are written. Of 
course this psychological interest determines somewhat the 
selection of the subjects which I discuss. Problems like 
those of scholarship and education, of temperance and 
customs, of superstition and nervousness, stand nearer to 
the psychologist than those of trusts and tax legislation. 
Some may even think that this tends to exclude the real 
problems before the American mind and to give atten- 
tion only to the by-problems. And yet in certain respects 
may not the less important problems be the most im- 
portant ones? 

All these essays have appeared in magazines. In The 
Atlantic Monthly, In McClure's Magazine, in the Metro- 
politan Magazine and so on, and I am obliged to them 
for the right to a new appearance. Practically every 
one of these papers has been discussed with unusual energy 
throughout the newspapers of the country. May a part 
of this generous Interest be maintained for this little 
book. I have revised the papers to a slight degree but 
only In the case of the essay on prohibition have I hoped 
to secure a better understanding by adding a lengthy 
epilogue. 

Hugo Munsterberg. 

Harvard University. 
March 1910. 



I 

THE FEAR OF NERVES 



THE FEAR OF NERVES 

T5EF0RE and since Moliere's immortal comedy, he 
who fancies himself to be the victim of a disease and 
suffers from Imaginary symptoms has always been the 
target of merry jests. But in modern times we see the 
more serious aspect of the case. On the one side, we 
know that to Imagine symptoms of disease can be Itself 
the expression of an abnormal state. And, above all, on 
the other side, to think oneself Into the role of the patient 
can be the starting-point for serious disturbances. By a 
kind of auto-suggestion, the healthy man becomes really 
111 if he fixates his mind on the symptoms which he be- 
lieves he feels. This curious and by no means harmless 
state may befall not only Individuals, but whole nations, 
whole generations. Society to-day, and especially the so- 
cial body of America, Imagines itself to be the pitiable 
victim of a miserable disease : general nervousness. 

Indeed, It Is a dogma of our generation, not that this 
or that man suffers from neurasthenia or other nervous 
diseases, but that our whole nervous make-up has become 
worse ; that nervous troubles are on the Increase ; that our 
entire social life has become neurasthenic, and that we 

I 



2 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

must do our utmost to protect our nerve energies against 
the tiredness and exhaustion which have become the habit- 
ual fate. Our time knows the symptoms, knows the con- 
ditions, knows the remedies of this national disease, and 
all fits together so nicely that the theory seems secure. 
No one has a right to doubt the facts any longer. All 
that remains Is to take care that we get a strong dose of 
the remedies. All parties concerned seem so perfectly 
satisfied with this vista of social psychology that It might 
seem easiest not to scrutinize the case, and not to play the 
physician who unkindly Insists that he wants not only to 
hear the complaints of the patient, but also to feel his 
pulse and measure his temperature and examine his lungs 
and heart. Yet here, too, the case may be one In which 
the imagined disease will easily become the source of real 
organic trouble. If our time goes on thinking Itself ab- 
normally nervous. It may Indeed finally become ill; and 
there are not a few indications that care is necessary. 
Thus, a little scrutiny may be useful after all. 

The symptoms of the Imagined disease are told us ev- 
erywhere. Most easily visible Is the general hurry and 
restlessness. Whether we see the Individual rush to his 
business or devour his lunch, see the overflow of useless 
movements from the chewing of gum to the ceaseless mo- 
tion of the rocking chair, or watch the hustling and push- 
ing of the public life, the hasty passing from one interest 
to another, everything suggests a nervous condition of so- 
ciety. There Is a social unrest which indicates an Inner 



THE FEAR OF NERVES 3 

nervous Irritation. But nervousness shows Itself not only 
In jerky, twitchy movements but, at the same time. In a 
quick exhaustion of the nervous energy. We need vaca- 
tions and excursions, the rest of country life and frequent 
changes more than any previous generation. Our nerve- 
energy Is so run down that we can get refreshment only 
by tickling amusements. After the day's work, who still 
has the mental force to see a tragedy on the stage? The 
nerves of our time demand musical comedies. Who still 
has the Inner concentration to read books? In the last 
twenty-five years the number of our book-stores has melted 
down to less than a third, In spite of the increase of the 
population. We are too nervous to read books. Our 
nerves can stand only the light short-cut magazine articles. 
This story of nervous restlessness and nervous fatigue 
comes to Its greatest expression In the rapid increase of 
nervous diseases. Two-thirds of our acquaintances have 
neurasthenia, and nervous prostration Is the fashion for 
men and women alike. Psychasthenic and hysteric symp- 
toms abound, and the waiting-rooms of the nerve special- 
ists are crowded. 

But there Is no need to point to the symptoms, as they 
can easily be foreseen as the necessary and natural conse- 
quences of the nerve-racking conditions under which we are 
bound to live. How often have we heard that our age is 
that of electricity. Every new Invention and every dis- 
covery has hastened the whole rhythm of our life. The 
adagio of our forefathers has become a prestissimo which 



4 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

must keep us breathless. And with the haste has come 
the noise. The metropolitan who has to think while the 
telephone rings and the elevated roars and the typewriter 
hammers must be a wreck before he is through with his 
work. Yet, endlessly worse is the inner tension of the life, 
the multiplicity of our engagements, the pressure of the 
responsibilities, and above all the sharpness of the compe- 
tition. It may be that the newspapers are especially re- 
sponsible. They have enlarged our sphere, so that every 
day heaps upon us a thousand exciting reports from all 
over the globe. There is no calling and no profession 
which does not feel the new, unsafe tension. Truly, it is 
not only the broker at the stock exchange whose emotions 
become over-strained. The conditions of the market-place 
have become such that everybody is over-burdened and has 
much more to do than his grandfather ever thought of do- 
ing. We are forced to automobile through life, and the 
fugitive impressions of the world through which we are 
racing must bewilder us and make us dizzy. There is 
no longer any repose or any relief. Our poor nerves are 
maltreated from morning to night, from childhood to old 
age. The nervousness of our time comes with the neces- 
sity of a natural effect. 

The only thing to be hoped for is at least to find some 
good remedies, and if we cannot effect a cure, as the case 
seems desperate, we may bring some passing alleviation. 
The most immediate help is, of course, the medical. The 
public does not wait for the physician, but supplies itself 
with all the nervina from aspirine to the glycerophos- 



THE FEAR OF NERVES 5 

phates. But the official drugs cannot suffice for the grow- 
ing demand for nerve cures. Mental healing and faith 
cures of all types, Christian Science and church clinics have 
been superadded. Every day creates new schemes for 
smoothing the irritated and the exhausted nervous system. 
Moreover, we try to eliminate at least the unnecessary 
scratching of our poor nerves. The wave of abstinence 
legislation has swept over the country. Alcohol surely is 
poison for weak nerves, but coffee is no better, and tobacco 
ruins them in another way. The crusade against artificial 
stimuli is controlled by an instinctive desire to save our 
wrecked nervous substance. The movement from the city 
to the country, to the seashore and mountains, aims to- 
wards the same goal. We instinctively feel that fresh air 
and sunshine may bring back to us what we have lost 
among skyscrapers and smoky chimneys. And best of all, 
at last the whole nation has learned the blessing of physical 
exercise. Plowever our daily life may cripple our nerves 
and our whole organism, everyone nowadays understands 
that at least half an hour a day must be devoted to physical 
exercise in order to restore the machinery. Whether we 
swing the dumb-bells or the golf stick, whether we bicycle 
or play ball or run, the nerve cure of regular bodily ac- 
tivity has at last been accepted by young and old, by rich 
and poor, by men and women, by the higher and the lower 
classes. If we had not this everpresent remedy, the nerv- 
ousness of the time would be intolerable. 

This story of the symptoms, the causes, and the remedies 
has become the stock equipment of our social neurology, 



6 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

and he who dares to doubt knows that he finds no neutral 
hearers. Nevertheless, I do not hesitate to claim that this 
story is imaginative from beginning to end. And if the 
prejudices are allowed to spread as in recent years, the 
behef in this self-made disease may indeed become a serious 
handicap. It is an illusion that our time is more nervous 
than earlier periods ; it is an illusion that the material and 
social conditions under which we live are favorable to 
nervous diseases; it is an Illusion that the highly-praised 
remedies would really serve their purpose if the disease ex- 
isted. 

To begin with the end, must it really be kept a secret 
that the dogma of the physical exercise is typical of this 
whole fabric of imagination? If once we liberate our- 
selves from the hygienic cant with which our time is over- 
flooded we must recognize the comic aspect of the situation. 
Millions of people are running wildly to catch a ball, lift- 
ing weights in fullest perspiration, trotting with gasping 
breath, and doing a hundred other useless tricks simply 
because a meaningless fashion has cruelly thrown them Into 
such a habit. Of course It seems as if the opposite may 
quickly be proved. Ask the man on the street whether 
he would not feel miserably If he gave up his daily exercise, 
and he will tell you from the bottom of his heart that he 
cannot live without it. He is right; and yet he is no more 
right than the morphinist who feels In despair and suffers 
if he cannot have his Injection; no rnore right than the 
habitual drinker who would not find sleep at night if he 
did not have his three mugs of beer after supper, or the 



THE FEAR OF NERVES 7 

other type who would have no appetite if he had no cock- 
tail before the soup. Certainly our whole central nerv- 
ous system adjusts itself rapidly to new forms of stimu- 
lation, and is In a poor state if the habitual excitement is 
taken away. A craving sets In which must be satisfied. 
We do not know much about the mechanism, but the facts 
cannot be doubted. The brain of the smoker really has 
to suffer if the accustomed daily stimulus is omitted. Is 
it the right conclusion that for this reason smoking Is 
necessary for the welfare of the human organism? 

Regular physical exercise of the artificial kind is a habit 
which, just like the moderate use of light alcoholic bever- 
ages, has certain advantages, but which must also be held 
within the closest limits, unless the disadvantages are to 
be greater. Certainly it Is no less artificially introduced 
into our social life, and In this case, too. It Is just as wise 
not to allow it to become a habit. To wander through the 
country on a fine day Is a beautiful Inspiration, and health- 
ful for everyone ; to need the walk with mechanical regu- 
larity Is the product of a bad training, and to become the 
slave of Swedish gymnastic apparatus Is no better than 
slavery to cigars. Of course, for certain purposes, it is 
desirable to develop the muscular forces of the body; then 
the physical exercise becomes labor. That Is an entirely 
different thing. For certain others, especially educational 
purposes, it Is most desirable to have sport and competi- 
tive athletics; then the physical effort becomes pleasure 
and play. But as mere exercise and restoration, it Is need- 
less In moderation and harmful in strong doses, and the 



8 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

necessity only results from the long training in it. For a 
long time the pedagogue even believed that muscular ef- 
fort was the best recreation after the intellectual work of 
the school child. Nowadays we know that the opposite Is 
true. Physical exercise demands the energies of the same 
brain which learns the school lesson and the fatigued brain 
becomes still more strained if its energies are tapped for 
a new activity. There is only one source of restitution of 
used-up brain energy, and that is rest and sleep, together 
with fresh air and good nourishment. If the craving for 
physical exercise is not intentionally injected into the body 
by habitual indulgence in this useless stimulation, the nor- 
mal personality can do just as good work and remain just 
as well without such strained effort. Moreover, he enjoys 
the moderate, occasional use of exercise far more. 

No less doubtful in their final effectiveness are the other 
popular remedies for the nerve troubles of our time. It 
is certainly no gain that headache powders and the 
sleeping drugs belong to the equipment of every fashion- 
able woman, and that they are sold over the counter of the 
soda-fountain. A passing discomfort is too often removed 
at the expense of really healthy nerves. Still worse is the 
psychotherapy of dilettanti. It seems to me one of the 
best indications of the splendid nervous constitution of the 
nation that it has passed with so little serious harm through 
the millionfold attacks on its nervous system which the 
amateurish psychotherapists of every denomination have 
directed against it. Most of that which the faith healers 
and mind curists and Christian Scientists and their kin are 



THE FEAR OF NERVES 9 

performing is very well meant and faithfully carried out, 
but splendidly arranged to create at least mild hysteria in 
weak nervous systems. Enviable is the race which shows 
sufficient nerve-strength to pass through It without real 
damage. 

Yet the Illusions are still queerer when our conditions 
of life are blamed as necessary causes of nervous exhaus- 
tion. Is not the nearest aim of our much-advertised 
technical civilization to save our nerve-energy? It is 
true that the electric current runs rapidly through the 
wire, but do we not let it run, so that we may remain quietly 
seated instead of running ourselves ? The technical mech- 
anism of our life has become more complex just for the 
sake of making our life itself simpler. The telephone at 
our desk and the elevator in our hall save us trouble. 
Where can we find more rest than on an express train? 
It is true its engine runs faster than that of the slow train, 
but that does not mean that we feel In a greater hurry 
when we are comfortably seated in the parlor car of the 
Limited. Our poor forefathers had to go through much 
nerve-irritation, but our life is smooth. How their visual 
brain centers must have suffered from their flickering light 
and from the astigmatism of lenses in the eye ! We have 
mild, steady light, and the oculist corrects our lenses. Our 
triumphing natural science, with all its marvelous Inven- 
tions, with Its progress of hygiene and pathology, has pri- 
marily removed the friction. Instead of a rough, rocky 
road, we move along on a smooth, asphalt street, over 
which there is really no difficulty in proceeding. 



lo AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

Of course it Is true that the social life has become more 
manifold and the outer tension has become stronger; but 
It Is entirely misleading to believe that that Is in itself a 
greater strain on the nervous system. The scientific psy- 
chologist brings no clearer conviction from his laboratory 
study of mental life than that of the relativity of mental 
states. Our attention, our feeling, our Interest, our ex- 
citement never depend upon the mere amount of the stimu- 
lus. The same amount may make a strong Impression at 
one time, at another a faint one, again under other condi- 
tions no impression at all. Everything depends upon its 
relation to the background. If three voices are shouting,, 
the noise becomes noticeably stronger when a fourth Is 
added, but If thirty are heard, one more or even five more 
will not be heard: ten more would have to join to make 
a perceptible difference. And if three hundred produce 
a noise, fifty more will not add anything: now a hun- 
dred must be brought in to secure the slightest growth 
in Intensity of the sound. The shouting of the hundred 
men when they fall in with three hundred makes no more 
Impression than one man when he joins only three others. 
This law prevails universally. The conditions for a feel- 
ing of difference, and therefore for an emotional excite- 
ment, are always relative. Two street boys who quarrel 
about a cent are no less enraged than two captains of in- 
dustry who quarrel about a million. It Is absurd to meas- 
ure the effect of our surroundings on our brain by the mere 
mass and size and strength of the attacking stimulus. The 
proportion alone is decisive. What may be the source of 



THE FEAR OF NERVES ii 

strongest emotion in the colorless village life may be a 
hardly noticeable, mild variation for the globe-trotter, 
which leaves scarcely a trace in his mind. 

No less important is another psychological fact: the 
mental adaptation which slowly levels down even the 
strongest impression. The miller does not hear the noise 
of the mill. No one of us feels the touch of his clothes. 
In the same way we have become insensitive by adaptation 
to our tumultuous surroundings. When we return from 
the mountain woods, we hear the roaring of the city for a 
day or two, and then it sinks below our consciousness and 
no longer harms our well-adapted nerves. ^ 

Moreover, while our modern life has become more man- 
ifold, its emotional strain is rather less severe than that of 
the past. Our life is less sentimental and more realistic 
and businesslike. No longer do we write the letters full 
of feeling which our grandparents wrote: we of to-day 
dictate notes. We do not keep emotional diaries : instead, 
we subscribe to the clipping bureau. Above all, our pub- 
lic life and our welfare is less threatened by dangers and 
sudden changes — the chief source of nervous shocks. 
Not only the meteorologist of the weather bureau tells us a 
long time beforehand when the thunder-storm or the hail- 
storm is to come ; our social life and our politics in this age 
of the cable are served by their weather bureaus, too. Ex- 
citement and public fear have been tuned down. Our 
growing tolerance works in the same manner. Conflicts 
are less embittered. On the whole we enjoy our disagree- 
ments and make pleasant after-dinner speeches out of them, 



12 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

and applaud the good stories of our opponent. This Is 
no age for being especially nervous. 

Of course it cannot be overlooked that such inner 
changes never move in one direction only. They may re- 
move certain evils and open the sources of others. A sim- 
ple yes or no does not answer such complex questions. 
For Instance, we pointed out that a reason for the nervous- 
ness of earlier generations was emotionalism and sentimen- 
tality, and that this has yielded to a cooler mutual relation 
of men. In the light of modern psychopathology we be- 
gin to understand that this may, nevertheless, be a condi- 
tion for nervousness of a very different kind. Recent years 
have shown that many of the hysteric and psychasthenic 
disturbances are simply the result of a suppressed memory 
of disagreeable experiences. An unpleasurable event 
which failed to find its natural expression becomes in a way 
strangulated in the mind and begins to work mischief there 
In the brain centers, even without conscious knowledge of 
the person. Now it is evident that sentimentality brings 
with it a mutual confidence and intimacy in which everyone 
finds many more opportunities of expressing the feelings 
of his mind, and thus disburdening his inner life from 
such mischievous intrusions. The businesslike soberness 
of our modern times has taken away this chance for confes- 
sion ; and many a nervous system may be wrecked, where a 
confessional might have saved it. This shows how the 
Ideal mental state cannot be prescribed by a simple psycho- 
logical formula, but at least so much ought to be clear 
to the social psychologist, that neither our nervous system 



THE FEAR OP NERVES 13 

nor the surroundings of our life should be blamed for our 
tiredness and restlessness. 

But there is no need of going on showing ttie illusory 
ideas as to the causes of our general nervousness. We 
can take a straighter road and insist that this nervousness 
Itself is an illusion. Of course, nervous diseases are plen- 
tiful ; and whatever medical science can do to relieve them, 
and whatever hygiene can do to prevent them, must be 
done most earnestly and insistently. The recent develop- 
ment of scientific psychotherapy promises much for the al- 
leviation of this human burden. But the more ready rec- 
ognition of nervous diseases does not justify the claim that 
nervousness has rapidly increased, and that it is the sig- 
nature of our time. And what is more important, in no 
way does it justify the nervousness over nervousness which 
has been spread by this uncritical acceptance of the illusory 
claim. It is arbitrary, for instance, to see in the rush and 
hurry a sign of nervousness. It is practically a sign of 
lack of co-ordination, a certain remainder of untrained im- 
pulsiveness and disconnectedness of movements which, on 
the whole, begins to disappear, or at least to be pushed 
westward. The jerky movements, the chewing and rock- 
ing and putting the feet on the table will soon be overcome, 
just as the spitting has nearly disappeared from the Eastern 
cities. On the contrary, the Americans strike the observ- 
ant foreigner as rather too patient. They are ready to 
tolerate delays and to wait quietly where the European 
would have become irritated, and they waste time wherever 
there is the least opportunity as only a very rich nation can 



14 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

afford to do. They begin their youth by wasting at least 
two years in school, reaching at nineteen a point which 
every intelligent being can certainly reach — by seventeen. 
After such thorough training in time-wasting, they per- 
sistently carry on the method. It is an illusion to believe 
that they change it and become time-saving simply because 
in traveling they jump up from their seats and rush to the 
end of the car ten minutes before their train reaches the 
station. 

Of course the reports of the hospitals and of the doctors 
seem to speak with figures. But may it not be with our 
psychasthenias and neurasthenias as it was when appen- 
dicitis became fashionable? The statistical reports of a 
certain European army showed that in ten years the 
number of appendicitis cases became four times larger, 
but a further scrutiny of the statistics demonstrated that 
exactly in the same percentage in which this favorite dis- 
ease was growing, all which had been classed as gen- 
eral intestinal troubles happily decreased. In short, it 
was evident that the spreading of the dreaded ailment 
was an illusion. It had only found a new name. Now 
it certainly is well that we have all the new names for 
the nervous disturbances and that we understand their 
character better to-day, but indeed a danger arises if this 
knowledge is turned into a discouragement, into an ex- 
aggerated attentiveness to states which an earlier period 
ignored or simply handled as variations of temperament 
and mood and imagination and will. Yes, the history of 
medicine points rather clearly to the opposite fact that 



THE FEAR OF NERVES 15 

nervous diseases have become less general, compared per- 
haps with medieval times. At least our time is spared 
the nervous epidemics of former centuries. 

Least of all ought we to measure the good or poor 
states of our national nerves by the complaints of tired- 
ness. It Is true there are persons who demand from 
their nerves more than hygienic life would allow because 
they are too little provided with the healthy feeling of 
fatigue which nature has arranged as a warning sign for 
the exhaustion of the nervous system. But incompar- 
ably larger Is the number of those who have trained 
themselves to feel fatigued long before any exhaustion is 
threatening. It Is a weakness of will and attention 
which causes the deceitful impression of nervous exhaus- 
tion, which Is really nothing but a poor habit. Imita- 
tion plays a big role In It ; continuous Indulgence a greater. 
The longing for rest and for Interruption of regular 
work can become just as much a craving and vicious cus- 
tom as the longing for stimulants. And just as every 
new artificial stimulation reenforces the desire, every new 
yielding to such pseudo-tiredness makes work more and 
more uncomfortable. 

Here we have finally reached a true evil which cannot 
be brushed aside as an illusion; yes, an evil which is too 
often responsible for that national fancy of general nerv- 
ousness. That from which the people really suffer, and 
perhaps suffer more than any other nation, more than any 
other time, is the weakness of attention. To be sure at- 
tention Is a function of the brain, and therefore ulti- 



i6 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

mately Is an act of our nervous system. But its weak- 
ness and lack of development is not a nervous disease; 
it is a bad habit of the nerves, but not nervousness. It 
is a wrong of the mind, but not a mental disease. And 
because this true evil is spreading in a most dangerous 
way it is important to recognize it and to warn against 
any misunderstanding, as if the symptoms which result 
from it were symptoms which demand the physician. 
The more the confusion between lack of attention and 
nervous weakness is favored, the greater are the chances 
that we shall coddle the nerves more and more, and in 
that way create nervous diseases without curing the fun- 
damental wrong. 

The foreigner who studies the American character will 
always be deeply Impressed by the wonderful striving for 
self-assertion, self-perfection, and self-realization, which 
gives meaning and significance to this greatest de- 
mocracy of the world. But there is one trait which he 
instinctively perceives, in spite of all his enthusiasm in the 
strength and glory of the New World. He cannot help 
feeling the lack of accuracy and thoroughness, the super- 
ficiality, the go-as-you-please character of the work; and 
this ultimately always means the lack of voluntary atten- 
tion. The small respect for the expert in every field, the 
condescending smile for the dry theory, belong together 
with the carelessness with which the girls spell and the 
boys calculate. Every feature of our social life shows 
an unwillingness to concentrate attention. Only that 
which can be followed without effort is welcome. The 



THE FEAR OF NERVES 17 

serious drama is deserted, and the vaudeville houses are 
crowded; the serious editorials of the newspapers disap- 
pear, and the racy style wins success ; the yellow-press 
tone colors larger and larger parts of politics, and even 
of court and church. And yet what else is the meaning 
of it but the victory of involuntary attention and the de- 
feat of voluntary attention? 

Human nature is indeed so arranged that the attention 
at first follows in an involuntary way all that is shining, 
loud, sensational and surprising. The real development 
of mankind lies in the growth of the voluntary attention, 
which is not passively attracted, but which turns actively 
to that which is important and significant and valuable in 
Itself. No one is born with such a power. It has to be 
trained and educated. Yes, perhaps the deepest mean- 
ing of education is to secure this mental energy which 
emancipates itself from haphazard stimulations of the 
world and firmly holds that which conforms to our pur- 
poses and ideals. This great function of education is too 
much neglected. As a reaction against a rigid, empty, 
mechanical instruction, there swept over the country a 
wave of electivism which was meant to bring the bless- 
ings of freedom, but which did bring primarily a destruc- 
tion of self-discipline. It is not difficult to foresee that 
much of this work must be undone. If kindergarten 
methods are allowed to penetrate where self-discipline of 
attention should be learned, the future citizen has lost his 
chance. 

Whoever is allowed always to follow the path of least 



1 8 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

resistance will soon find any work drudgery and any ef- 
fort tiring and a torture to his nerves. A child who 
never has received an order, but who at six years of age 
has been only begged and persuaded, will never be his 
own master at twenty-six. Self-control demands a long 
preparation, and lack of self-control is only another name 
for many of those symptoms which the outsider calls 
nervousness. There is no work in the world most of 
which is not drudgery and an irritation to the nerves for 
one who, in his time of education, forgot to learn the 
joy of doing his duty. I read this morning in a great 
newspaper: *' There are few more trying and nerve- 
wrecking tasks than that of beating eggs by hand; to 
keep the hand moving at the right speed requires the con- 
centration of much nerve-force." I have never tried it 
myself, and therefore cannot compare this " nerve-wreck- 
ing task " with some other exhausting demands which 
this cruel age of ours requires from our nervous system; 
but I feel sure that they are mostly of similar character. 
And while I see with delight from the same article that 
this particular scourge of mankind has lost Its terror, 
since a machine has been invented with a paddle that 
works automatically to beat eggs, I am certain that in 
the meantime this type of mind has discovered a score 
of other nerve-wrecking tasks. Seriously, the more we 
spoil our attention and cultivate in ourselves the passive 
attitude which Is driven hither and thither by every 
changing event, the more we must become frightened by 
the real work of the world which does not allow us to 



THE FEAR OF NERVES 19 

shift. The school-teacher Is more Important for curing 
the nervousness of our time than the physician. 

But one other Important point must not be overlooked 
If we try to understand why the surface view of our 
social life gives such an Impression of nervous restless- 
ness. It Is the predominance of the feminine mind in 
the shaping of national society. The other day I heard 
a solemn speech by an old gentleman who declared once 
more that the chief difference between our age and the 
past Is the technical discoveries. Some days later I 
gained much deeper wisdom from the lips of a little boy. 
I was visiting a large new school In Buffalo. The prin- 
cipal brought me Into a history class where the children 
had just been learning about the old Romans and their 
family organization. The first question which the young 
woman teacher asked In our presence was the momentous 
one: *' What do you think is the greatest difference be- 
tween the life of the old Romans and our modern Amer- 
ican life?" She pointed to a little boy who arose and 
said: "With the old Romans the father was the head 
of the family." The whole situation was Illuminated in 
a marvelous way. 

Yes, In our age the woman Is the head of the family, 
and the woman Is the head of our social life ; Is the head 
of our art and literature ; Is the head of our social reforms 
and our public movements ; is the head of our Intellectual 
culture and of our moral development. Who can deny 
that it has brought to the nation an abundance of help 
and of charm? It has kept alive the nobler Interests 



2Q AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

when the men's energies were absorbed by the rough 
pioneer work of the land. But for this very reason, It 
was unavoidable that public life should have accepted 
many characteristic features which belong essentially to 
the female mind. And there Is none more typical than 
the shifting of attention. The feminine mind certainly 
has an Inferior power of inhibition and therefore less en- 
ergy of concentration. If we characterize It In this way, 
It sounds as If It were a defect, but shadow and light lie 
near together. The woman does not Inhibit; she lives 
less in abstractions and, ultimately, that means that she 
sees things and persons In their wholeness, where men 
see only one-sided aspects. In short, this peculiarity of 
the feminine mind has Its great advantages. It will do 
much more justice to a personality, because all aspects 
are considered, the attention moving from one to another. 
It Is the Ideal mental condition for work which demands 
plenty of small detail, where the attention has to go from 
one thing to another without any long focusing at a par- 
ticular point. Here centers the remarkable talent of the 
woman for the care of the home; here lies her wonderful 
Influence for harmony and beauty, for the conservation of 
traditions, and for the emotional life. 

But all these talents and traits of the woman's mind 
must produce very different effects when her sphere of 
activity becomes unrestricted. That which gives charm- 
ing lightness to the female activity In the narrower sphere 
easily becomes a flippant superficiality and a nervous rest- 
lessness In the wider realm. The predominance of 



THE FEAR OF NERVES 21 

women with quickly moving attention gives to the Amer- 
ican life a general aspect of haste and nervousness, where 
every movement is quickly taken up and quickly forgot- 
ten, where fads and fancies are alternating with undig- 
nified rapidity, and where public discussions too often re- 
main superficial and controlled by feeling. 

Hence, in order to cure the so-called nervousness of 
our time, the remedies ought to be adapted to these true 
evils. The dumb-bells and bromides are not enough. 
On the one side we need more training in self-discipline^ 
In continuous effort. In voluntary attention, and In thor- 
oughness; and on the other, more willingness of the men 
to share with the women the control of our cultural life, 
and to bring to It steadiness and persistence. This self- 
discipline will also eliminate many nuisances which, from 
a medical point of view, really interfere with nervous 
health. For Instance, the whole radicalism of the pro- 
hibition movement would not be necessary If there were 
more training for self-control. To prohibit always 
means only the removal of the temptation, but what Is 
endlessly more important Is to remain temperate in the 
midst of a world of temptation. The rapid growth of 
divorce, the silly chase for luxury, the rivalry In ostenta- 
tion and In the gratification of personal desires In a hun- 
dred forms cannot be cured if only one or another temp- 
tation Is taken out of sight. The Improvement must 
come from within. The fault is In ourselves. In our 
prejudices, in our training. In our habits, and In our fan- 
ciful fear of nervousness. 



II 

THE CHOICE OF A VOCATION 



II 

THE CHOICE OF A VOCATION 

TN those colleges where the choice of a course is left 
to the student, it is always interesting to inquire into 
the motives that guide the preference. Of the hundreds 
who flock to a course in history, or economics, or chem- 
istry, or literature, certainly there are many who know 
that they have chosen the course that they need and the 
one that will be most profitable for their inner develop- 
ment. But there are others, and those others are far too 
many. Some students select a course because their 
friends are taking It, others because they have heard that 
it is a " soft snap." Sometimes a course Is chosen be- 
cause the lecturer Is well known for his witty remarks, 
sometimes because the lecture hour conflicts least with 
the training for athletics, and again because the lecture 
room is conveniently located downstairs or because the 
books needed for the course are small enough to be car- 
ried In the pocket. 

On the whole, this situation also pictures the methods 
by which the American youth chooses his life work. The 
overwhelming majority must enter upon a bread-win- 
ning life when the graded school has been passed. Here 
also a large number certainly have an aim and a goal, and 

25 



26 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

with firm step they enter the chosen path. But a dis- 
couraging number of boys and girls are drifting here and 
there from haphazard motives and most trivial causes. 
The hasty advice of an incompetent friend, a chance ad- 
vertisement, a superficial liking for some surface features 
of a calling without any knowledge of its real duties, a 
vague illusory idea as to the great financial rewards of 
a line of work, push a boy in this or that direction. As he 
has not been trained for any definite thing, and has 
neither a conscious preference nor sufiicient knowledge of 
the social world with its openings and its opportunities, 
he is glad to slip in anywhere. 

All this repeats itself, not very differently though on 
a somewhat higher level, with that smaller part of the 
population that has passed through the high schools. To 
be sure, those four additional years have given to many a 
boy a wholesome opportunity to find himself and to dis- 
cover his aptitudes and interests. But, if we watch the 
further development, we witness the depressing sight of 
the same haphazard selection of a practical career, the 
same ignorance, the same valuation of petty circum- 
stances, the same drifting. The most important step In 
life is often taken with hardly more deliberation than 
many of those boys would use in selecting a new suit of 
clothes. 

The student who recklessly chooses his lecture course 
In college may lose the highest gain, but the result will 
not be serious harm. Every course Is planned so as to 
give him something of value. But an unsuitable life 



THE CHOICE OF A VOCATION 27 

course may result In real harm — yes, in failure and 
wreck. Surely the divorce mills of the country have 
enough to do; but the cases in which a man Is divorced 
from his profession, or at least ought to be divorced from 
it if his life is not to be misery to him, are even more 
numerous. Yet, the cases of failure are not the only ones 
that count against the present system. From the national 
point of view, the absurd wastefulness condemns this 
reckless scheme no less. The boy who drives a butcher's 
cart, then becomes call boy in a hotel, afterward goes to 
work in a factory, and a few weeks later tries the next 
chance job that offers itself, loses the great advantage 
of systematic training for a definite task. 

No one can deny that this careless shifting and unpre- 
pared entrance upon a life career is dangerously favored 
by certain conditions of American life. Politics and the 
whole social structure of the country have always encour- 
aged the view that everybody is fit for everything. The 
traditional disrespect for the expert, the old-fashioned 
spoils system, the tendency of democracy to put the tech- 
nical government of towns Into the hands of untrained 
men, have too long reinforced the impression that noth- 
ing but the possession of intelligence and energy are nec- 
essary to fill any place. The absence of social barriers 
and the predominance of the money influence, the lack of 
discipline and authority in the education of the youth, 
and, perhaps strongest of all, the natural wealth of the 
nation, work in the same direction. The country could 
afford the limitless waste of human energies, just as it 



28 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

felt justified in wasting the timber resources of the forest. 

But in recent years all this has changed. The more 
complex conditions of modern life, the progress of science 
and economics, of sanitation and education, have grad- 
ually taught the country a new respect for the services of 
the expert; the devastating spoils system has had to 
yield, and the national conscience has forcefully awaked 
in its protest against the waste of the national resources. 
This new spirit has at last started a growing conviction 
among thinking people that something must be done for 
the youth who seeks a vocation. 

To many the most natural way would seem to be in a 
reorganization of the schools. Indeed, it has often been 
proposed to give to the child a greater chance for special- 
ization, even in the lower schools. In this way the school 
might develop little specialists who would be better pre- 
pared than others for certain lines of work, and who would 
be more successful through such early training. More- 
over, the school would have opportunity to adjust such 
early specialization to the gifts and predominant interests 
of the individual boy or girl. But a more thorough study 
of the functions of the public school sounds a decided 
warning against this tendency. Dangers lurk there on all 
sides. The safety of the nation demands a real com- 
mon ground for the whole population, a common educa- 
tion in the fundamentals of the national life. The more 
years the youth of the country can devote to a general 
education, the more wholesome will be the state of society 



THE CHOICE OF A VOCATION 29 

and the stronger the Inner life of the Individual. The 
school must give to everybody that which binds us all in 
a common social intercourse, In an understanding of the 
public life and of nature. The school would be hampered 
In this Its highest mission If Its program were encroached 
upon by the demands of personal calling. 

But the dangers of a pseudo-professional work in the 
schools would result no less from the intrusion of an ele- 
ment of personal whim and fancy. The child would fol- 
low his personal liking at a time when he needs most of 
all to learn to overcome his mere likes and dislikes. 
In the years that should be devoted to the learning of 
the highest task, the doing of one's duty, the boys and 
girls would be encouraged In the ruinous habit of follow- 
ing the path of least resistance. The vocational aspect 
ought to be excluded absolutely from the public schools. 
Even subjects like manual training, which may become 
most useful for certain practical callings. In the school- 
room ought to be kept In the position of a formal disci- 
pline. The boy should learn in his manual training les-. 
son that power of accuracy and observation, of attention 
and energy, that will be helpful to him in every walk of 
life; he should not learn carpentry there In order to be- 
come a carpenter. Truly, they are the youth's best friends 
who insist that this principle ought to hold even up to 
the higher stages of school life. More elasticity may be 
allowed in the high school, and still more in the college 
work; but even these will ultimately be the more helpful 



30 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

the freer they are kept from professional aspects. Only 
when the schools have poured out their floods must the 
stream be guided Into safe channels. 

In the Institution of vocational schools a most important 
step forward has been taken. Industrial education and 
trade schools have at last won the Interest of progressive 
countries. By means of these perhaps more than by any- 
thing else, modern Germany has made Its rapid strides for- 
ward. The boy of fourteen who cannot afford to prolong 
his general education can do no better than to get thor- 
ough Instruction In a specialized line. The advantage of 
these vocational schools would have to be acknowledged 
without reservation If we did not face one serious danger. 
The school Is excellent for the boy who would otherwise 
spend his time In a desultory bread-winning activity; but 
such a school Is harmful If It draws the boy away from a 
further pursuit of liberal education. It would be most 
regrettable If the Industrial schools should contribute still 
more to the growing depletion of the high schools. The 
vocational school Is the desirable solution for those who 
cannot afford the higher school, but It Is undesirable for 
those who, for practical reasons, prefer It to a further lib- 
eral training. Yet, If this danger Is kept sufficiently In 
view, the blessing of the vocational school for the youth 
who Is seeking a life work must be most heartily acknowl- 
edged. 

Similar In Importance Is the establishment of vocation 
bureaus, a movement that was started In Boston by the late 
Professor Parsons, a true benefactor to the community, and 



THE CHOICE OF A VOCATION 31 

that has been taken up in various other places. It repre- 
sents an innovation of unlimited possibilities. Parsons' 
posthumous work on the choice of a vocation outlines his 
plans and suggests vividly the manifold cases that have 
been helped by the work of the vocation bureau. He rec- 
ognized clearly that the need for guidance is at no time 
in life more essential than in the transition from school to 
work. He saw that inefficiency and change of vocation, 
with all the waste and cost involved, '^ are largely due to 
the haphazard way in which young men and women drift 
Into emplo)mients, with little or no regard to adaptability, 
and without adequate preparation or any definite aim or 
well-considered plan to insure success." 

The effort of the vocation bureau Is to remedy these con- 
ditions through expert counsel and guidance. The Im- 
mediate means consist, first. In furnishing the young people 
with a knowledge of the requirements and conditions of 
success, the compensations, opportunities, and prospects In 
different lines of work; second. In guiding the candidate to 
a clear understanding of his own aptitudes, abilities. Inter- 
ests, resources, and limitations. Moreover, the officers of 
the vocation bureau must act as true counselors, reasoning 
patiently with the boy or girl on the practical relations be- 
tween their personal qualities and those objective conditions 
of the social fabric. Thus the goal of the bureau Is to find 
for every one the occupation that Is In fullest harmony with 
his nature and his ambitions and that will secure for him 
the greatest possible permanent Interest and economic 
value. No doubt much depends upon the wisdom and 



32 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

judgment, the sympathy and insight, of the counselor; and 
not every manager of such an Institute will equal in that 
respect the founder of the first vocation bureau. Cer- 
tainly, for such a task, thorough preparation is needed, and 
the equipment of a pioneer school for the training of voca- 
tional counselors was therefore necessarily the next step. 

The gathering of objective data that are needed to fur- 
nish all possible information has been most successfully 
started, and the little guide-book already contains unusually 
rich material regarding the conditions of efficiency and suc- 
cess in different industries; a classification of industries; a 
most suggestive list of ways of earning money that arc 
open to women at home and away from home, indoors and 
out of doors, skilled and unskilled. The bureau has also 
prepared schedules showing the earnings for each industry, 
the average wage, sex, and nativity of persons engaged in 
various occupations, the movement of demand in about two 
hundred vocations during the last decades, and many sim- 
ilar facts that would furnish the background for the dis- 
cussion of any industrial case. All this becomes significant 
when applied to the personal quahfications of the candi- 
date. 

The methods employed to determine these individual 
facts are, so far, of a more tentative character. Here, de- 
cidedly, discussion is still open. And this Is the point at 
which the interest of the experimental psychologist is at- 
tracted, and it appears his duty to take part in the discus- 
sion. The emphasis of the inquiry lies, as yet, on a self- 
analysis and on the impression of the counselor. In order 



THE CHOICE OF A VOCATION 33 

to get the fullest possible self-analysis, the candidate is 
asked to answer, in writing, a large number of questions 
that refer to his habits and his emotions, his likings and his 
ambitions, his characteristics and his resources, his experi- 
ences and his capacities. It seems in a high degree doubt- 
ful whether the results obtained by this method really 
throw a clear light on those mental factors that the coun- 
selor needs for his advice. Such self-analysis Is very diffi- 
cult and, above all, very easily misleading. The average 
man knows his mental functions as little as he knows the 
muscles that he uses In walking or speaking. For Instance, 
the boy Is asked questions like the following : 

Compare yourself as to courage with others of your age. 
Is your attitude toward employers cordial and sympathetic or not? 
If you could have your every wish fulfilled, what would be your 
first half dozen wishes? 
What sort of people do you prefer to live with? 
Mention the limitations and defects in yourself. 
Do you cultivate smiles and laughter by right methods? 
Do you take care to pronounce your words clearly? 
Do you look people frankly in the eye? 
Are you a good listener? 

Are you thoughtful of the comfort of others? 
Can you manage people well? 
Are you planning to form further friendships? 
Do you talk a good deal about yourself? 
Are your inflections natural and cheery? 

Such questions, representative of the most varied fields 
of Inquiry, may yield bits of suggestion as to character In 
some cases, but they may, no less frequently, be answered 
misleadingly. To estimate the value of his replies we 
should have to know the boy thoroughly; yet we seek those 



34 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

replies In order to get that thorough knowledge. Hence 
we move in a circle* If we desire a careful, exact analysis 
of mental functions, we must not forget that the last de- 
cades have brought the science of the mind to a point 
where such an analysis can be performed by means of an 
exact experimental science. The modern psychological 
laboratory disentangles the mental functions with a sub- 
tlety that surpasses the mere self-observation of practical 
life as much as the search with the microscope surpasses 
the viewing of objects with the naked eye. 

It Is true that the modern psychological laboratory has 
been Interested primarily In the finding of general laws for 
the mental life. But In recent years the attention of ex- 
perimental psychologists has turned more and more to the 
study of Individual differences and to the development of 
methods designed to bring these differences to the clearest 
perception. We now realize that questions as to the men- 
tal capacities and functions and powers of an Individual 
can no longer be trusted to Impressionistic replies. If we 
are to have reliable answers, we must make use of the 
available resources of the psychological laboratory. 
These resources emancipate us from the Illusions and emo- 
tions of the self-observer. The well-arranged experiment 
measures the mental states with the same exactness with 
which the chemical or physical examination of the physi- 
cian studies the organism of the Individual. 

Of course, the psychological experiment does not enter 
into such complicated questions as those quoted. It turns 



THE CHOICE OF A VOCATION 35 

to the elements of mental life. And just here lies its 
strength. As the organs of man are merely combinations 
of cells and tissues, so his mental personality is a complex 
combination of elementary states. If we know the simple 
parts, we can calculate beforehand the fundamental direc- 
tion of the development. On the other hand, we can an- 
alyze every calling and vocation in order to find there, too, 
the essential elements and fundamental features. We can 
determine which particular mental activities are needed 
for special lines of life work, and can then compare these 
demands with the table of results from an experimental 
analysis of the special mind. Only the application of ex- 
perimental tests can give to the advisory work that subtle 
adjustment by which discrimination between similar tasks 
becomes possible. 

To give an Illustration, there are mills In which 
everything depends on the ability of the worklngman to 
watch, at the same time, a large number of moving shut- 
tles, and to react quickly on a disturbance In any one. The 
most Industrious workman will be unsuccessful at such 
work if his attention Is of the type that prevents him from 
such expansion of mental watchfulness. The same man 
might be most excellent as a worker In the next mill, where 
the work demanded was dependent upon strong concentra- 
tion of attention on one point. There he would surpass 
his competitors just because he lacked expanded attention 
and had the focusing type. The young man with an in- 
clination to mill work does not know these differences, 



36 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

and his mere self-observation would never tell him 
whether his attention was of the expansive or of the con- 
centrated type. 

The psychological laboratory can test these individual 
differences of attention by a few careful experiments. The 
psychologist, therefore, is in a position to advise the youth 
at which type of factory to apply for work and which 
to avoid. Under present methods all would be largely a 
matter of chance. The man with the focusing attention 
might seek work in the mill where distributed attention 
is needed, and would feel sure that his industry and good 
will were sufficient to make him successful In his work. 
And yet the result would be disappointment and failure. 
Discouragement would ensue. He would soon lose his 
place, and drift on. The psychologist might have turned 
him in the right direction. The laboratory would have 
reproduced the essential characteristics of those various 
machines, and would have measured, perhaps in thou- 
sandth parts of a second, the rapidity, and in millimeters 
the accuracy, with which the reacting movements were 
performed at the various types of apparatus. These 
differences of attention are most important in various 
callings; and yet, the layman is inclined to discriminate 
only between good and bad attention. He Is not aware 
that there exist a large variety of types of attention, each 
of which may be favorable for certain life works and very 
unfavorable for others. 

To be sure, all such laboratory tests presuppose a real 
knowledge and careful analysis of the work to be per- 



THE CHOICE OF A VOCATION 37 

formed. Dilettantism here would easily lead into blind 
alleys. I remember a case where the Boston Vocation 
Bureau asked me to examine the auditory reaction time 
of a young man who wanted to become a stenographer. 
The examination was to determine whether his response 
to sound was quicker or slower than the average. If it 
were slower, he was to be warned against the career of 
a shorthand-writer. 

I refused to undertake the test, because I considered 
that the conclusion would be misleading. Even if the 
boy reacted slowly, so that the first word that he heard 
were written down by him possibly a fifth of a second 
later than his competitor wrote it, would that really show 
him to be less efficient? If both were to write from dic- 
tation for a whole hour, the boy with the slower reaction 
time would still, at the end of the hour, be just a fifth of 
a second behind the other, which, of course, would be of 
no consequence. The quickness of the other man's sound 
reaction would not make it at all certain that he would 
hold out with his shorthand-writing as long as the slower 
man. In the imagination of the counselor, it appeared 
that the delay of a fifth of a second on the first word 
would bring an additional delay on the next word, and 
that the time lost would in this way accumulate. What 
really needed to be examined was the rapidity of succes- 
sive action and the retention in memory of the spoken 
words. 

This problem of retention, too, demands very subtle 
inquiry. The future stenographer knows that he needs 



38 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

a good memory, but to him the word " memory " covers 
mental functions that the psychologist must carefully sep- 
arate. The young man confidently asserts that he has a 
good memory for words, because after a long interval he 
remembers what he has learned. Yet, that is an aspect 
of memory that is of no consequence for his shorthand 
work. The memory he needs is that of immediate re- 
tention. Experimental analyses demonstrate that this 
retention and the later remembering are two quite inde- 
pendent functions. For instance, the child has strong 
power of remembering, but small power of retention, 
while in the adult the power of retention surpasses that 
of remembering. The child must hear a number of 
words or figures more often than the adult before he can 
repeat them correctly. But, once the adult and the child 
have learned those figures, the chances are that the child 
will remember them after a longer time than the adult. 
The laboratory experimenter would always have to sep- 
arate the test for such immediate reproduction from that 
for the later recall, and would have to consider carefully 
in which vocations the one or the other is an essential 
condition of success. 

But if the psychological conditions of different vocations 
were scientifically disentangled and the mental analysis 
were carried through with all the discriminations that the 
progress of experimental psychology suggests, the voca- 
tion bureau would secure data that would be of the 
highest service. The association of ideas and the appre- 
ciation of the outer world, the imagination and the 



THE CHOICE OF A VOCATION 39 

emotions, the feelings and the will, the attention and the 
discrimination, the accuracy and the effort, the sug- 
gestibility and the judgment, the persistence and the 
fatigue, the adaptability and the temperament, the skill, 
and even the character, with a hundred other functions 
and their interrelations, could be mapped out by decisive 
experiments. No boy ought to become a chauffeur, how- 
ever his fancy is excited by motor-cars, if his reaction 
times In the laboratory indicate that he would not be 
quick enough to stop his automobile if a child ran in 
front of the wheels. No one ought to try for secretarial 
work who shows in the laboratory lack of inhibitory power 
and therefore a probable inability to be discreet. The 
boy who shows no sensitiveness for small differences ought 
not to work In a mill or factory in which his labor would 
be a constant repetition of the same activity. He would be 
oppressed by the uniformity of the work, it would soon 
be drudgery for him, and, with his interest, he would 
lose the good will. The next boy, who is sensitive to 
small differences, might find in the same work an Inex- 
haustible pleasure and stimulus, as no two repetitions 
would be alike for him. 

The other day I wired from Boston to a friend in 
another town that I should expect him the next day at the 
Hotel Somerset. The telegram arrived with the state- 
ment that I should be at the Hotel Touraine. The 
operator had substituted one leading hotel of Boston for 
another. No good will on his part can help that young 
man. He Is not In the position of another Boston 



40 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

operator, whom I recently gave a cablegram to Berlin,, 
and who, as he looked up the rate, asked: "Berlin is 
in France, isn't it?" The geography of the latter can 
be cured, but the mental mechanism of the former, who 
under pressure of rapid work substitutes an associated idea 
for the given one, is probably fundamental. The psy- 
chological laboratory would easily have found out such 
mental unreliability, and would have told the man before- 
hand that, however industrious he might be and however 
suited for a hundred other professions, that of the tele- 
graph operator would not be one in which he could reach 
the fullest success. 

The establishment of psychological laboratories as part 
of municipal vocation bureaus would by no means demand 
a very costly and elaborate outfit. An intelligent assistant 
with thorough psychological training could secure much 
of the material with a minimum of apparatus. There are 
hundreds of psychological experiments that can be carried 
out with some cardboard and sheets of paper, strings and 
pins and needles, little outline drawings and printed 
words, small colored tops and levers, hairpins and card- 
board boxes, balls and boards, picture-books and smelling- 
bottles, a pack of cards and a set of weights and perhaps 
a cheap stop-watch. Where ampler funds are at the 
disposal of the bureau, an electrical chronoscope ought to 
be added, and, if possible, a kymograph. But in all 
cases the experiments themselves may be relatively simple, 
and even the most modest apparatus can furnish an 
abundance of insight into psychological differences of 



THE CHOICE OF A VOCATION 41 

which the mere self-observation of the candidate does not 
take any account and for which any gaze of the outer 
observer would be insufficient. 

The educational psychologists on the one side, the 
physicians, and especially the psychiatrists, on the other, 
have shown us the way in this field. The educator may 
ask a child to strike out the letter e wherever it occurs in 
a given page, and to do it as quickly as possible. He 
measures the time it requires and the accuracy with which 
it is done by seeing how often a wrong letter has been 
canceled and how often the right letter has been over- 
looked. He knows that even such a rapid test indicates 
more with regard to the attention and accuracy and swift- 
ness of the child than he can find out by the regular school 
tests. He knows that only such elementary inquiries with 
exactly measureable results can discriminate between the 
various factors that are involved in any complex school 
work. Or the educator examines the power of the chil- 
dren to learn or to count at various hours of the day, and 
draws from it pedagogical conclusions as to the best ar- 
rangement of the school program. Of course, the school 
work must be adjusted to the average since all must have 
school work at the same time. Yet such experiments 
demonstrate the great individual differences. The curve 
of fatigue is different for almost every individual. More- 
over, the psychological experiment can analyze the great 
varieties of fatigue, the fluctuations, the chances for a 
restitution of energy after fatigue; and it is evident that 
every result can be translated into advice or warning with 



42 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

regard to the vocational choice of the boy or girl. There 
are machines to which people with one type of fatigue 
could never be adapted, while those with another type 
might do excellent work. 

Even the natural rhythm of motor functions is different 
for every individual. The pace at which we walk or 
speak or write is controlled by organic conditions of our 
will, and is hardly open to any complete change. Again, 
it is clear that the thousands of technical occupations de- 
mand very different rhythms of muscle contraction. If 
a man of one natural rhythmical type has to work at a 
machine that demands a very different rhythmical pace, 
life will be a perpetual conflict in which irritation and 
dissatisfaction with his own work will spoil his career 
and will ruin his chances for promotion. In a similar 
way, simple experiments might determine the natural lines 
of interest in a boy or girl. We might show pictures 
of farms or factories, of ships or railroads, of mines or 
banks, of natural scenery or street scenes, of buildings or 
theater stages, and so on. How much Is kept in memorj- 
and how much is correctly appercelved after an exposure 
of a few seconds, how they affect the emotional expres- 
sions, and similar observations of objective character, may 
quickly point to mental traits that must be considered If a 
harmonious life work is to be hoped for. 

There Is no fear that such Institutes, with their psy- 
chological laboratories, would play the guardian In too 
rigid and mechanical a way, restricting too much the 
natural freedom of the youth. On the contrary, nothing 



THE CHOICE OF A VOCATION 43 

but the counselor's advice would be Intended, and no one 
who was unwilling to listen to a warning would be re- 
strained from following his own Inclination. 

The young genius will always find his way alone, and 
even his severe disappointments are a beneficial part of his 
schooling for higher service ; but the great average masses 
do not know this powerful Inner energy that magnetically 
draws the mind toward the ideal goal. They do not 
know the world and its demands; they do not know the 
opportunities and the rewards, the dangers and the diffi- 
culties; and they do not know themselves, their powers 
and their limitations. The old Greek legend tells us that 
when a man and woman find each other for life, it Is a 
reuniting of two separate halves that have been one whole 
In a previous existence. This ought to be the way In 
which a man and his profession might find each other. 
But not every marriage nowadays suggests the Greek 
legend, and the unity of vocation and Individual seems 
still less often predestined. And if fate has not decided 
the union in such a previous life, society ought at least 
to take care that in this life the choice be made with 
open eyes and with the advice of a counselor who knows 
how to fructify the psychological knowledge of our age. 



Ill 

THE STANDING OF SCHOLARSHIP 



Ill 

THE STANDING OF SCHOLARSHIP 

A LL Signs seem to point in the same direction. From 
the primary school to the university, from the 
kindergarten to the vocational life, there seems to arise 
in our day a demand for greater thoroughness and effort 
and serious concentration. A hundred symptoms in- 
dicate, and serious educators proclaim, that a turn of the 
road is near. There may have been a time — perhaps it 
Is only a legend — when education had become ineffective 
through its formalism and rigidity. The children were 
forced by severe methods to do work repugnant to them. 
The prescribed studies of the college boys were dry and 
tiresome. It must have been a depressing kind of in- 
struction in which the best energies of the youth were 
insistently subdued. A great reaction had to come. 
School-time was to be made a period of happiness, the 
child was to learn only what he liked, the college boy was 
to study only that which seemed interesting. Only that 
which appealed to the taste and to the attention was 
deemed worthy of the classroom. Instead of formal 
training, at last we had instruction which really opened 
to the boys and girls a gay-colored world where they 
might enjoy themselves to their heart's content. It was 

47 



48 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

a period in which the children were no longer ordered, 
but begged and persuaded; in which the abundance of 
elective courses made a handsome volume out of the an- 
nouncements of the smallest college; athletics flourished, 
and in the school all, with the exception of the teachers, 
had a good time. 

But now in the zigzag movement of educational prog- 
ress, a new counter-movement seems imminent. We have 
been trying the national experiment long enough to test 
its results. We have seen the girls who have been 
educated in the high schools with " current events," and 
the boys who were no longer molested by the demand for 
Greek. But the outcome seemed more disappointing 
than ever. Every one who was not deceived by a showy 
exterior soon discovered the mental flabbiness and super- 
ficiality which resulted from the go-as-you-please methods. 
We began to feel that those who had never learned to 
obey never really became their own masters; those who 
had never trained their attention by forcing their will 
toward that which is unattractive had to learn by severe 
disappointments later that a large part of every life's work 
must be drudgery. The youth left the school with a hun- 
dred things in their minds, but without any power of 
intellectual self-discipline. 

Our public life reflects this lack everywhere. The 
newspapers and magazines, the theaters and the social- 
reform movements, are more and more made for a public 
which looks only to be entertained, and which has lost 
the power of sustained attention to that which is not at- 



THE STANDING OF SCHOLARSHIP 49 

tractive in itself; and the nation slowly begins to realize 
that such a mental state of the community is the natural 
soil of every kind of moral weed. Thoroughness Is only 
another form of conscientiousness. He who early ac- 
quires the habit of inaccuracy and carelessness will never 
have the energy to work against evil where It Is easier 
and more convenient to let things go as they will. 

We stand only at the beginning of this new reaction, 
but we already hear from many sides that more serious 
discipline and training and effort must be secured. This 
coincides with the fact that educational psychology, since 
It has entered Into the stage of careful experimental work, 
has brushed away the widespread prejudices regarding 
the training of mental powers. The theorists who ad- 
vocated the coddling education had made much of the 
fact that no training can really change the mental powers 
of the Individual. A bad memory never becomes a good 
one. Experimental psychology has demonstrated the 
fallacy of such pet Ideas. Memory and attention, ap- 
perception and reasoning, feeling and emotion, effort and 
will, can be remoulded by a well-directed education; and 
this development of the mental powers may easily appear 
to many as a more important gain than any addition to 
the stored-up knowledge of facts. But the community on 
the whole Is not eager to consult the experimental psychol- 
ogist: from the deepest needs of social life the new long- 
ing has arisen. 

If the nation is not to suffer by a cheap complacency 
and the triumph of ostentatious mediocrity, the whole 



50 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

educational life must be filled with a new spirit of devotion 
to serious tasks. The commencement addresses of the 
leading men of the country this year have given fervent 
expression to this instinctive demand of the nation. So 
far as the colleges are concerned, one imperative change 
stands in the center of every platform: scholarship must 
receive a more dignified standing in the eyes of the un- 
dergraduates. The constant appeal to the mere liking of 
child and boy and adolescent has finally made the side- 
shows more important than the real arena. The univer- 
sity administrations practically everywhere recognize such 
a reform as a most urgent need. Means must be found 
to effect a complete revision in the views of the average 
students. So long as the best human material in our 
colleges considers it as more or less below its level to 
exert effort on its studies; so long as it gladly leaves the 
high marks to the second-rate grinds, and considers it 
the part of a real gentleman to spend four college years 
with work done well enough not to be dismissed, and 
poorly enough never to excel, there is something vitally 
wrong in the academic atmosphere. 

Some seem inclined to think that the whole blame be- 
longs to athletics. If the interest in intercollegiate sport 
is allowed to take hysteric character, and if the successful 
college athlete stands in the limelight of publicity, it ap- 
pears necessary that the devotee of quiet scholarship 
should remain unnoticed in the dark, and that his modest 
career should not attract the energetic fellow. What- 
ever the reasons may be, many suggestions for reform 



THE STANDING OF SCHOLARSHIP 51 

have been made. Perhaps none may more quickly lead 
to an improvement than the much-discussed plan of in- 
troducing a stronger element of competition into the 
scholarly sphere, and thus using for intellectual purposes 
those levers which have been so effective in the field of 
sport. The effort to put the highest energy into scholar- 
ship has not reached its ideal form so long as it is con- 
trolled by the hope of surpassing a rival. That for 
which we must aim Is certainly a more genuine enthusiasm 
for intellectual efficiency. And yet the present situation 
would not only excuse, but really demand, the fullest pos- 
sible play of these secondary motives. If we can foster 
scholarship by an appeal to the spirit of rivalry, by all 
means let us use It. We may hope that as soon as better 
traditions have been formed, and higher opinions have 
been spread, the Interest in the serious work will replace 
the motives of vanity. As soon as the finest men of the 
college turn, from whatever motives, with their full 
strength toward their class-work, the masses may follow, 
and higher and higher ambitions will be developed. 

Of course, no one can overlook some intrinsic difficultle$ 
In the way of such plans. No artificial premium can 
focus on the successful scholar that same amount of 
flattering Interest and notoriety which the athletic victory 
easily yields. The difference lies simply In the fact that 
the student's athletic achievement represents, in that little 
field, a performance which may be compared with the 
very best. The scholarly work of the undergraduate, on 
the other hand, at Its highest point necessarily remains 



52 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

nothing but a praiseworthy exercise, incomparable with^ 
the achievement of great scholars. The student football- 
player may win a world's record; the student scholar in 
the best case may justify noble hopes, but his achieve- 
ment will be surpassed by professional scholars every 
day. 

But the real difficulties in the transformation of the 
present state, after all, lie much deeper. Certainly, the 
faculties of the universities ought not to leave anything 
undone which may shift the center of gravity in the little 
encircled academic world. But however high the hopes 
may be, we ought not to underestimate the much greater 
difficulties which have their origin outside of this college 
world. May it not be an illusion to believe that the de- 
plorable lack of appreciation for scholarship of students 
can ever be fundamentally changed so long as the cor- 
responding ideas in the great world outside of the college 
campus are not thoroughly revised? No college faculty 
can change situations on the campus, if they are simply 
symptoms and results of the conditions in our whole social 
organization. The scholarship of the students will never 
be fully appreciated by the most vital men in college so 
long as public opinion does not back them; that is, so 
long as scholarship has no real standing in the American 
community. 

If we are sincere, we ought not to overlook the fact 
that the scholar, as such, has no position in public opinion 
which corresponds to the true value of his achievement. 
The foreigner feels at once this difference between the 



THE STANDING OF SCHOLARSHIP 53 

Americans and the Europeans. The other day we 
mourned the death of Simon Newcomb. There seems 
to be a general agreement that astronomy Is the one 
science in which America has been In the first rank of the 
world, and that Newcomb was the greatest American 
astronomer. Yet his death did not bring the slightest 
ripple of excitement. The death of the manager of the 
professional baseball games Interested the country rather 
more. Public opinion did not show the slightest con- 
sciousness of an Incomparable loss at the hour when the 
nation's greatest scholar closed his eyes. And If I com- 
pare It with that deep national mourning with which the 
whole German nation grieved at the loss of men like 
Helmholtz and Mommsen and VIrchow, and many an- 
other, the contrast becomes most significant. 

When the president of Harvard University gave up his 
administrative work, the old Harvard students and the 
whole country enthulsastlcally brought to him the highest 
thanks which he so fully deserved. But when, the year 
before, William James left Harvard, the most famous 
scholar who has worked In this Harvard generation, the 
event passed by like a routine matter. At the commence- 
ment festivities every speaker spoke of the departing ad- 
ministrative officer, but no one thought of the departing 
scholar. And that exactly expresses the general feeling. 

It was said with emphasis the other day that the 
strength of the American university lies in Its graduates. 
In Germany, for Instance, Inside and outside of the aca- 
demic circles, every one would take it as a matter of course 



54 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

that the strength of a university lies exclusively In the 
professors; and moreover In the professors as scholars. 
If I think back to my student days In my fatherland, the 
greatest events of those happy years were the festivities 
and torchlight processions which we boys organized for 
our great professors when they declined a call to another 
university. Their work and their fame in the world of 
scholarship was our greatest pride. For their sake we 
had selected one or another alma mater. The American 
students feel this pride and attachment only for the in- 
stitution as such ; the individual scholars there are to them 
merely the appointed teachers; they may like them as 
teachers, but consider their scholarly achievment a private 
affair. 

A very characteristic symptom of the situation is the 
prevalent opinion that as a matter of course every pro- 
fessor Is ready to become a college president. Again and 
again scholars from most widely different fields are dis- 
cussed for presidencies, even in places where they would 
have to give up their scholarly work and be obliged to go 
over entirely into administrative work. It Is evident that 
such a change lies well in the line of men whose scholar- 
ship refers to government or economics or similar sub- 
jects. But If a scholar of Greek or mathematics is treated 
as an equally natural candidate, it clearly indicates that 
the public does not consider the university professor 
primarily as a productive scholar, but essentially as an 
officer of the institution. To change from a professor- 



THE STANDING OF SCHOLARSHIP SS 

ship to a presidency then appears as a kind of promotion, 
while in reality It means a change of profession. 

In both the United States and Germany the scholars 
are almost exclusively university professors, in striking 
contrast to France and England, where many of the 
greatest scholars have always been outside of the universi- 
ties. But this personal union has had different effects 
In the two countries. In Germany, the exultant respect 
for scholarship raised the career of the mere university 
professor; in America, by the lack of respect for scholar- 
ship, the standing of the Individual scholar has on the 
whole come to be determined by his administrative posi- 
tion in the universities. Those who have a kind of per- 
sonal reputation, independent of their services to the 
institutions, owe It as a rule to extraneous features. Per- 
haps they make a practical discovery, or give eloquent 
popular lectures, master a picturesque epigrammatic style 
or like to write magazine articles in their leisure hours; 
in a word, they earn a reputation by their by-products, in 
spite of their scholarship. 

Again, it would be shortsighted to Isolate this feature 
of public opinion from the whole social physiognomy. 
This relatively low standing of the scholar's work very 
naturally resulted from the whole make-up of public 
opinion. It is certainly not a necessary part of democ- 
racy, but it has been a characteristic element in the de- 
velopment of American public life, that every one feels 
himself a judge of everything, every one is fit for every 



56 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

place, and every one knows what Is worth while in life. 
There is no one who can appeal so little to such a court 
of judges as the scholar. He has nothing to show. 
Even the greatest scholar could not point to a fair success, 
when the success Is to be measured In commercial terms. 
Any clever lawyer or skillful physician would greatly out- 
shine him — not to speak of the banker and the broker. 
He cannot show his success In that popularity of notoriety 
which comes to the politician or the literary man or the 
administrator or the athlete. His work Interests a few 
score of colleagues. Even the external conditions do not 
furnish those official labels by which the high opinion of 
the few who know Is made widely visible to the crowd — ' 
the English knighthood for the leading scholars, the 
governmental decorations and titles. Men whose names 
may be among the noblest assets of the United States In 
future centuries, at a time when the names of the wheat 
kings and railroad kings will be forgotten, thus remain 
negligible quantities In the public opinion of to-day. 

Hence the most direct reflection of this public situation 
In the college life is not the disrespect for high-grade 
class-work, but, still more, the unwillingness of the best 
men to turn toward a scholarly career. It seems to be 
the unanimous experience of the faculties In all the leading 
universities that the men who turn to the graduate school 
represent a less energetic material than the average of 
the senior class or of the law school. The finest men go 
into business and Industry, law and medicine; and those 
who turn to the graduate schools of the country to pursue 



THE STANDING OF SCHOLARSHIP 57 

the life of a scholar are, in the majority, men without 
initiative and ambition, and without promise for the high- 
est kind of work. Of course, there is no lack of excep- 
tions. There will always be a few men whose genius calls 
them, who feel the need of solving the problems which are 
before their souls, and whose vision sees clearly the noble 
scholarly achievement. But these exceptions are too few. 
The man with power and ambition usually seeks another 
path, he cannot feel attracted to a calling which finds so 
little appreciation in the community, he must instinctively 
feel as if he were going into a second-rate profession In 
which no high rewards are awaiting him. And all this 
constitutes a vicious circle, with the common result that in 
all layers of society, with young and old alike, scholar- 
ship is not acknowledged as a vital force. It has no 
access to the Inner life of men. 

The world laughed when Heinrich Heine's disrespect- 
ful humor in the Harzreise ridiculed the scholarly 
pedantry of old Gottingen. He says, " Before the gate 
of the town I heard two little schoolboys, and the one 
said to the other, ' I no longer want to have any social 
Intercourse with Theodore. He is a disgusting cheap 
fellow. Yesterday he did not even know the genitive of 
mensa.^ ^* Yes : that sounds absurd ; and yet there will 
never be really great scholarship in a country where there 
is not sufficient honor for scholarship to attract the very 
best men to such a career; and the adult men will never 
possess this high belief, unless the whole atmosphere Is 
so filled with it that even the children instinctively feel it. 



58 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

Yet the fact that scholarship has no worthy standing 
In the community at large Is again not the ultimate source 
of the distortion of values. We must go still further 
to find what is really the last sociological cause. Behind 
all of It stands a characteristic view of life, a kind of 
philosophy which Is on the whole vaguely felt, but which 
not seldom even comes to definite expression. Whenever 
It becomes shaped In such definite form, It Is proclaimed, 
not as a debatable proposition, and not as an argument 
which is upheld against any possible opposition, but It Is 
always naively presented as a matter-of-course principle. 
This naive philosophizing crystallizes about the one Idea 
that the end of all social striving Is to be the happiness 
of Individuals. Now, this is exactly the well-meaning 
philosophy of the eighteenth century, the philosophy of 
the rationalists in the period of enlightenment. It Is a 
philosophy which formed the background of all the social 
movements of that Important period, and was therefore 
the philosophy out of which the Constitution of the United 
States naturally arose. 

The greatest happiness of the greatest number of In- 
dividuals Is Indeed the social ideal which, outspoken or 
not, controls the best forward movements of the country. 
It seems to stand above the need of any defense, as it 
evidently raises itself high above the low selfishness of 
the masses. He who works for the pleasures of millions 
must be in the right, because those who think only of 
their own pleasure are certainly in the wrong. Now, to 
be sure, a social body organized in order to secure the 



THE STANDING OF SCHOLARSHIP 59 

maximum of happiness for its members will have a high 
appreciation of knowledge. The period of enlighten- 
ment very naturally even overestimated the value of 
knowledge as an equipment of man. But knowledge then 
and now was in question only as a tool for practical 
achievement. Such a society will therefore work with the 
greatest enthusiasm for good schools and widespread edu- 
cation, and will take care that everybody may have the 
opportunity to learn as much as possible, because wide 
information and acquaintance with the world must help 
the Individual In his striving for Individual success and 
satisfaction. The splendid efforts of the American people 
for the raising and expanding of the school system are 
thus completely In line with this latent philosophy of en- 
lightenment. 

But the history of civilization shows that such philos- 
ophy Is by no means a matter of course ; It is a particular 
aspect seen from a particular standpoint. Other periods, 
other nations, have seen the world from other standpoints, 
and have emphasized other aspects of reality. In a 
bird's-eye view we see throughout the history of mankind 
the fluctuations and alternations between positivism and 
Idealism. The philosophy of enlightenment is positivism., 
It Is true. In the trivial talk of the street, we call a man 
an Idealist if he does not think of his personal profit, but 
of the pleasure of his neighbors. But, in a higher sense 
of the word, such unselfish altruism does not constitute 
an Idealistic view of the world. On the contrary. It may 
have all the earmarks of positivism. 



6o AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

We have positivism wherever the concrete experiences 
— and that means that which " is " — make up the whole 
of reality. We have idealism where the view of the 
world is controlled by a belief in absolute values for which 
there is no " is," but only an " ought; " which have not 
the character of concrete experiences, but the meaning of 
obligations which are to be fulfilled, not in the interest of 
individuals, but on account of their absolute value. For 
the positivist, knowledge and truth and beauty and prog- 
ress and morality have meaning merely in so far as they 
contribute to the concrete experiences of satisfaction in 
existing individuals : for the idealist, they represent ideals 
the realization of which gives meaning to individual life, 
but is eternally valuable independent of the question 
whether their fulfillment contributes to the pleasure of in- 
dividuals. From such an idealistic point of view it seems 
shallow and meaningless to see the end of striving in a 
larger amount of individual happiness. The purpose of 
man is to do his duty, — not to be pleased. 

This is not the place to enter into a real discussion of 
these two types of philosophy, and to develop the system 
of eternal values as against the relativism and pragmatism 
and utihtarianism of the positivists. This is not even 
the place to ask which of the two views of the world, 
and of human life. Is the deeper one and the more fit to 
give account of the reality in which we live. Here we 
have to emphasize only the fact that this great antago- 
nism of world-views is going on, in order to Insist that 
scholarship, that is, the devotion to the advancement of 



THE STANDING OF SCHOLARSHIP 6i 

knowledge, can find Its true appreciation only In a society 
which instinctively believes in Idealism. 

To give at once a historical background to this contrast, 
we have only to look from the philosophy of the United 
States to the underlying world-view of the German nation. 
Germany went through the same ideas of enlightenment In 
the eighteenth century; then came the great philosophical- 
literary uplifting of the national spirit, the period 
of Schiller and Goethe, of Kant and Fichte and Hegel. 
It was a national reorganization, in which the Idea of 
the purpose of man became thoroughly revised. Not ex- 
perience, but conviction; not the "is," but the "ought," 
became the pivot. This does not mean that the average 
man read, or would have understood, Kant and Fichte; 
but the ideas of the great thinkers reached the entire na- 
tional life through a thousand channels, and the whole 
new German education and organization of society was 
controlled by this idealistic turn. Duty and discipline 
and submission to an ideal of absolute value became the 
underlying forces; and, however much millions of selfish 
individuals may have wandered away from the Ideal, the 
fundamental direction of the national energies had been 
given. 

The aim of life then became the realization of absolute 
values. The individual and the state alike received 
through this conviction their aim and their meaning; and 
nothing else can claim real dignity but that which ul- 
timately serves this Ideal fulfillment. In such a philos- 
ophy the moral deed is not valuable because It adds to 



62 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

the pleasure of the neighbor, but because it Is eternally 
good; the work of art Is valuable, not because it pleases 
the senses, but because It realizes the ideal of beauty; the 
world of the market is valuable, not because it satisfies 
individual needs, but because it means a realization of 
the Ideal of progress ; the life of the state is valuable, not 
because it secures the greatest happiness of its members, 
but because it is a realization of the ideals of right, and 
as such of eternal value : and knowledge, too, is valuable, 
not because it is a serviceable tool for the pleasure of in- 
dividuals, but because it is a fulfillment of the ideal of 
truth. 

In a society in which this is the instinctive background 
of public feeling, the incomparable position of scholarship 
must be secure from the start. The scholar, like the 
artist or the minister or the statesman, serves his ideal 
with every fibre of his life. Whether his knowledge will 
ever be transformed into practical use for anything is not 
the question. That could not add to the worth and dig- 
nity of his achievement. All which gives meaning and 
absolute value to his creation is that it serves the advance- 
ment of truth, that it adds to the world's forward move- 
ment toward the ideal. The scholar, as productive 
scholar, therefore stands on a higher level than he who 
serves only the happiness of individuals. Where such a 
thought, clearly expressed or vaguely implied, stands In 
the center of national ideas. It must be reflected every- 
where; It must give to every effort toward knowledge a 
new meaning and a new aspiration. To learn for truth's 



THE STANDING OF SCHOLARSHIP 63 

sake then becomes a kind of ideal service ; and even if it is 
Indeed only the genitive of mensa, It means duty. 

Such an Idealistic view of the world may seem and must 
seem to many a logical monstrosity. They have their 
skeptical and positlvistic and pragmatic arguments on the 
tip of their tongues. And this antagonism has existed at 
all times. There would have been no need for a Socrates 
and a Plato and their Idealism, if the country had not 
resounded with the positivism of the old Sophists. The 
point Is only that we must not believe that, In a positlvistic, 
utilitarian society, we can ever give that standing to 
scholarship which It naturally has in a society controlled by 
philosophical Idealism. Of course, many would say that a 
change would not be worth while anyhow, or that It would 
be too dearly bought, if we were to get higher standing 
for scholarship and government and art by giving up our 
philosophy of enlightenment. But it must be clear that 
we cannot have one without the other. And at least we 
ought to give up the superficial Illusion that just such a 
type of positlvistic philosophy Is the regulation equip- 
ment for a true democracy. 

Indeed, there Is no lack of Indications that American 
life, too, is trying to overcome the narrowness of utilitarian 
philosophy, and Is moving toward Idealistic ground; 
nothing seems to hold back this progress so much as the 
illusion that the greatest happiness of the individual Is 
the only possible goal for a democracy. On the surface 
It may appear as If positivism has more consideration for 
every concrete individual, and Is thus more inclined to 



64 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

award an equal share of the world's pleasures to every 
one. On the other hand, idealism, which believes in the 
value of the whole as a whole, may appear more inclined 
to appreciate the symbols which represent the whole, and 
therefore to endorse the symbolic forms of the monarchy. 
In this sense it was not by chance that the Americans, 
under the influence of a positivistic philosophy of the 
eighteenth century, founded a republic. 

Yet history shows that utilitarian motives have erected 
monarchies too, and that true democracies have been 
filled with the spirit of idealism. The American attitude 
there Is controlled by nothing but tradition. Their 
democracy originated historically from a positivistic phi- 
losophy which was most suitable for a century of pioneer- 
ing and developing the resources of the new world. But 
now, as times have changed, as new aims and historic 
purposes come into the foreground, the national philos- 
ophy too must adjust itself to the new age ; and progress 
ought not to be hampered by an illusory belief in the 
democratic character of utilitarianism. On the contrary, 
If the purpose of life is understood as the reahzation of 
Ideals, the democracy comes to its highest meaning. 
Each man has an ideal share in the national duty, each 
man equally should contribute his part toward the realiza- 
tion of absolute values, and equally should submit his 
Individual desire for his pleasure and happiness, for his 
Individual fancy and opinion, to the service of the ideal 
good. 

There Is an abundance of factors which, even in the 



THE STANDING OF SCHOLARSHIP 6s 

midst of our utilitarian life, point to the necessity of this 
Inner change. For instance, It Is very curious to see how 
the technical complexity of our life forces on individuals 
an Increasing submission to the judgment of the expert. 
At first it was only the expert In engineering and sanita- 
tion, slowly It has become the expert in education, finally 
it will become the expert in government. But whether 
the positivism of the time will be undermined by such 
new practical demands, or by new philosophical thoughts, 
or by a new emotional revival, in any case indications are 
abundantly visible that a change is to come. This great 
new educational uprising against the go-as-you-please 
scheme, and this new cry for more thoroughness and dis- 
cipline, for more serious respect for scholarship, are aftei; 
all only symptoms of this great national movement. It Is 
essential to recognize these connections. So long as the 
reforms are confined to our school and our colleges, they 
may Improve the situation but can never be fundamen- 
tally effective. The real reform can come only If It Is 
supported by a corresponding movement throughout the 
national life. 

As soon as the nation feels that the meaning of life 
lies, not In the greatest pleasure for the greatest number 
of Individuals, but in the realization of eternal Ideals, then, 
as a matter of course, school and college and vocational 
life will be reshaped and reorganized. Then, on the 
university campus, scholarship and athletics will no longer 
be rivals which stand on the same level: athletics will be 
the joyful play which gives pleasure and recreation to 



ee AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

individuals, and serves its purpose well if it makes happy 
boys more able to live for their real life-tasks ; but scholar- 
ship will be a service which does not ask but which finds 
respect everywhere, as it is sacred through its own dignity. 
Service to scholarship will then appear to every one just 
as valuable as honesty and morality ; it is an eternal reward 
in itself. 



IV 
PROHIBITION AND TEMPERANCE 



IV 

PROHIBITION AND TEMPERANCE 

TF a German stands up to talk about prohibition, he 
might just as well sit down at once, for every one in 
America, of course, knows beforehand what he Is going 
to say. Worse, every one knows also exactly why he is 
so anxious to say it : how can he help being on the wrong 
side of this question? And especially if he has been a 
student in Germany, he will have brought the drinking 
habit along with him from the Fatherland, together with 
his cigar smoking and card playing and duelling. If a 
man relies on his five quarts of heavy Munich beer a day, 
how can he ever feel happy if he is threatened with no 
license in his town and with no beer in his stein? Yet 
my case seems slightly different. I never in my life 
played cards, I never fought a duel, and when the other 
day in a large women's college, after an address and a 
reception, the lady president wanted to comfort me and 
suggested that I go into the next room and smoke a cigar, 
I told her frankly that I could do it if it were the rule in 
her college, but that it would be my first cigar. With 
beer it is different. Last winter in traveling I was for 
some days the guest of an Episcopal clergyman, who, an- 
ticipating the visit of a German, had set up a bottle of 

69 



70 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

beer as a welcome, and we drank together the larger part 
of the bottle — but I think that is my only case in late 
years. When I had to attend a Students^ '* Commers," 
I was always protected by the thick mug through which 
no one could discover that the contents never became less 
during the evening. I live most comfortably in a pleas- 
ant temperance town which will, I hope, vote no-license 
year by year as long as freshmen stroll over the old Har- 
vard Yard. And although I have become pretty much 
Americanized, I have never drunk a cocktail. 

Hence the problem of prohibition does not affect my 
thirst, but it greatly interests my scientific conscience; not 
as a German, but as a psychologist I feel impelled to add 
a word to the discussion which is suddenly reverberating 
over the whole country. But is it really a discussion 
which we hear? Is it not rather a one-sided denunciation 
of alcohol, repeated a million times with louder and 
louder voice, an outcry ever swelling in its vehemence? 
On the other side there may be the protests of the dis- 
tillers and brewers and wine-growers and bottle-makers 
and saloon-keepers, and perhaps some timid declarations 
of thirsty societies — but such protests do not count, since 
they have all the earmarks of selfishness; they are ruled 
out, and no one listens, just as no one would consult the 
thieves if a new statute against pickpockets were planned. 
So far as the really disinterested public is concerned, the 
discussion is essentially one-sided. If serious men like 
Cardinal Gibbons raise their voices in a warning against 



PROHIBITION AND TEMPERANCE 71 

prohibition, they are denounced and overborne, and no 
one cares to imitate them. 

It has been seldom indeed that the fundamental evil 
of American public opinion has come out so clearly; 
namely, that no one dares to be on the unpopular side; 
just as in fashion and social life, every one wants to be 
" in it." No problem in America has a fair hearing as 
soon as one side has become the fashion of mind. Only 
the cranks come out with an unbalanced, exaggerated op- 
position and thus really help the cause they want to fight 
against. The well-balanced thinkers keep quiet and 
simply look on while the movement rushes forward, wait- 
ing quietly for the reaction which sets in from the inner 
absurdity of every social extreme. The result Is too often 
a zigzag movement, where fearlessness might have found 
a middle way of steady progress. There must be indeed 
a possible middle way between the evil of the present 
saloon and the no less evil of a future national prohi- 
bition; yet if this one-sldedness of discussion goes on, it is 
not difficult to foresee, after the legislative experiences 
of the last years, that the hysterical movement will not 
stop until prohibition is proclaimed from every State-house 
between the Atlantic and the Pacific. 

Exaggerated denunciation of the prohibition movement 
is, of course, ineffective. Whoever simply takes sides 
with the saloon-keeper and his clientele — yes, whoever is 
blind to the colossal harm which alcohol has brought and 
is now bringing to the whole country — Is unfit to be heard 



72 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

by those who have the healthy and sound development of 
the nation at heart. The evils which are connected with 
the drinking habit are gigantic; thousands of lives and 
many more thousands of households are the victims every 
year; disease and poverty and crime grow up where alco- 
hol drenches the soil. To deny it means to ignore the 
teachings of medicine and economics and criminology. 

But is this undeniable fact really a proof of the wisdom 
of prohibition? The railroads of the United States In- 
jured last year more than one hundred thousand persons 
and put out seven thousand hopeful lives; does any sane 
man argue that we ought to abolish railroads? The 
stock exchange has brought recently, economic misery 
to uncounted homes, but even at the height of the panic 
no one wanted to destroy the market for industrial stocks. 
To say that certain evils come from a certain source sug- 
gests only to fools the hasty annihilation of the source be- 
fore studying whether greater evils might not result from 
its destruction, and without asking whether the evils might 
not be reduced, and the good from the same source re- 
main untouched and untampered with. Even if a hollow 
tooth aches, the modern dentist does not think of pulling 
it; that would be the remedy of the clumsy village bar- 
ber. The evils of drink exist, and to neglect their cure 
would be criminal, but to rush on to the conclusion that 
every vineyard ought therefore to be devastated Is un- 
worthy of the logic of a self-governing nation. The other 
side has first to show its case. 

This does not mean that every argument of the other 



PROHIBITION AND TEMPERANCE 73 

side is valid. In most of the public protestations, es- 
pecially from the Middle West, far too much is made of 
the claim that all the Puritanic laws and the whole pro- 
hibitionist movement are an interference with personal lib- 
erty. It is an old argument, indeed, " Better England 
free than England sober." For public meetings it is just 
the kind of protest which resounds well and rolls on 
nobly. We are at once in the midst of the '' most sacred " 
rights. Who desires that America, the idol of those who 
seek freedom from the tyranny of the Old World, shall 
trample on the right of personal liberty? And yet those 
hundreds of singing-societies which have joined in this 
outburst of moral indignation have forgotten that every 
law is a limitation of personal liberty. The demand of 
the nation must limit the demands of the individual, even 
if it is not the neighbor, but the actor himself who is 
directly hurt. No one wants to see the lottery or gam- 
bling-houses or the free sale of morphine and cocaine 
permitted, or slavery, even though a man were to offer 
himself for sale, or polygamy, even though all wives 
should consent. To prevent temptation toward ruinous 
activities is truly the State's best right, and no injury to 
personal liberty. The German reflects gladly how m.uch 
more the German State apparently intrudes upon personal 
freedom: for instance, in its splendid State insurance for 
old age and accidents. 

To be sure, from this German viewpoint it is hard to 
understand why the right of the State to subordinate per- 
sonal wishes to national ones should not carry with it a 



74 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

duty to make compensation. To him the actions of some 
Southern States appear simply as the confiscation of prop- 
erty. When, as has happened, a captain of industry 
erects a most costly brewery, and the State in the follow- 
ing year prohibits the sale of beer, turning the large, new 
establishment into a huge, useless ruin, without giving the 
slightest compensation, the foreigner stands aghast, won- 
dering if to-morrow a party which believes in the State 
ownership of railroads may not prohibit railroading by 
private companies without any payment to the present 
owners. 

Yet the "political aspect does not concern the social 
psychologist. I abstract from it as from many others. 
There is, indeed, no limit to the problems which ought 
to be studied most seriously before such a gigantic revolu- 
tion Is organized. The physician may ask whether and 
when alcohol is real medicine, and the physiologist may 
study whether it is a food and whether it is rightly taken 
as helpful to nutrition; but this is not our problem. The 
theologians may quarrel as to whether the Bible praises 
the wine or condemns the drinker, whether Christ really 
turned water into that which we call wine, and whether 
Christianity as such stands for abstinence. It is matter 
for the economist to ask what will become of the hundreds 
of thousands of men who are working to-day in the brew- 
eries and related industries. A labor union claims that 
" over half a million men would be thrown out of employ- 
ment by general prohibition, who, with their families, 
would make an army of a million human beings robbed of 



PROHIBITION AND TEMPERANCE 75 

their means of existence." And the economist, again, 
may consider what it might mean to take out the license 
taxes from the city budgets and the hundreds of millions 
of internal revenue from the budget of the whole country. 
It is claimed that the breweries, maltsters, and distillers 
pay out for natural and manufactured products, for labor, 
transportation, etc., seven hundred million dollars an- 
nually; that their aggregate investments foot up to more 
than three thousand millions; and that their taxes con- 
tribute three hundred and fifty millions every year to the 
public treasuries. Can the country afford to ruin an in- 
dustry of such magnitude? Such weighty problems can- 
not be solved In the Carrie Nation style: yet they are 
not ours here. 

Nearer to our psychological interest comes the well- 
known war-cry, " Prohibition does not prohibit." It is 
too late in the day to need to prove it by statistics : every 
one knows it. No one has traveled in prohibition States 
without seeing the sickening sight of drunkards of the 
worst order. The drug-stores are turned into very re- 
munerative bars, and through hidden channels whiskey and 
gin flood the community. The figures of the United States 
Commissioner of Internal Revenue tell the story pub- 
licly. In a license State like Massachusetts, there exists 
one retail liquor dealer for every 525 of population; in a 
prohibition State like Kansas, one for every 366. But 
the secret story Is much more alarming. What Is the 
effect? As far as the health of the nation and its mental 
training In self-control and in regulation of desires are 



76 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

concerned, the result must be dangerous, because, on the 
whole, it eliminates the mild beverages in favor of the 
strong drinks and substitutes lonely drinking for drink- 
ing in social company. Both are psychologically and 
physiologically a turn to the worse. It is not the mild 
beer and light wine which are secretly imported; It Is 
much easier to transport and hide whiskey and rum, with 
their strong alcoholic power and stronger effect on the 
nerve-cells of the brain. And of all forms of drinking 
none is more ruinous than the solitary drink, as soon as 
the feeling of repugnance has been overcome; there is 
no limit and no inhibition. If I look back over the last 
years, in which I often studied the effects of suggestion 
and hypnotism on habitual drinkers, I do not hesitate to 
say that it was in most cases easier to cure the social 
drinker of the large cities, than to break the lonely drinker 
of the temperance town. Of course, prohibition reduces 
somewhat the whole quantity of consumption, but it with- 
draws the stimulant, in most cases, where it would do the 
least harm and intensifies the harm to the organism where 
it is most dangerous. 

But man is not only a nervous system. Prohibition 
forced by a majority on an unwilling minority will always 
remain a living source of the spirit of disregard for law. 
Yet, "unwilling" minority Is too weak an epithet; the 
question is of a minority which considers the arbitrary rule 
undemocratic, absurd, immoral, and which really beheves 
that It Is justified In finding a secret way around a con- 
temptible law. 



PROHIBITION AND TEMPERANCE 77 

Judges know how rapidly the value of the oath sinks 
In courts where violation of the prohibition laws is a fre- 
quent charge, and how habitual perjury becomes tolerated 
by respected people. The city politicians know still bet- 
ter how closely blackmail and corruption hang together, in 
the social psychology, with the enforcement of laws that 
strike against the beliefs and traditions of wider circles. 
The public service becomes degraded, the public con- 
science becomes dulled. And can there be any doubt 
that disregard of law is the most dangerous psychological 
factor in our present-day American civilization? It is 
not lynch law which is the worst; the crimes against life 
are twenty times more frequent than in Europe, and as 
for the evils of commercial life which have raised the 
wrath of the whole well-meaning nation in late years, has 
not disregard of law been their real source? In a popular 
melodrama the sheriff says solemnly: " I stand here for 
the law *'; and when the other shouts in reply, " I stand 
for common sense! " night after night the public breaks 
out into jubilant applause. To foster this immoral negli- 
gence of law by fabricating hasty, ill-considered laws in 
a hysterical mood, laws which almost tempt toward a 
training in violation of them, is surely a dangerous experi- 
ment in social psychology. 

Hasty indeed is that kind of law-making. Within a 
few years, during which the situation itself has not been 
changed, during which no new discoveries have proved the 
right or necessity, during which no experts have reached 
common results, the wave has swollen to a devastating 



78 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

flood. Who let It loose? Were the psychologists asked 
to decide, or the physicians, or the physiologists, or the 
sociologists, or any one who has studied the problem as a 
whole with professional knowledge? Certainly not: their 
commissions have hardly ever proposed total abstinence. 
Of course, those who rush on mean the best as they see 
it; they want to make better men; but can a nation ever 
hope to reach private morality by law and thus to exclude 
all private lying and greediness and envy and ingratitude 
and temper and unfairness just as well as intemperance? 
Such vague mixing of purposes always characterizes super- 
ficial legislation. A sober contemplator must ask himself : 
What Is It to lead to If well-meaning, short-sighted dilet- 
tantes can force legislation on questions which, demand the 
most serious expert study ? 

There is growing throughout the land to-day a con- 
viction — which has its core of truth — that many peo- 
ple eat too much meat; and not a few see a remedy In 
vegetarianism and Fletcherlsm. If this prejudice swells 
In a similar way, the time may come when one State after 
the other will declare slaughtering Illegal, confiscate the 
meat-packing houses, and prohibit the poisonous consump- 
tion of beef and the killing of any creature that can look 
on us with eyes. Other groups are fighting coffee and 
tea, and we may finally land In nuts and salads. Yes, ac- 
cording to this line of legislative wisdom, there is no 
reason for prohibiting only alcohol. Do I go far beyond 
the facts In asserting that In certain States the same 
women and men who are publicly against every use of 



PROHIBITION AND TEMPERANCE 79 

alcohol are also opposed to the " drugs " of the physi- 
cians and speak of them privately as poisons? Not the 
Christian Scientists only — in intellectual Boston thou- 
sands of educated women speak of drugs and nervine as 
belonging to a medieval civilization which they have out- 
grown. The same national logic may thus lead us to laws 
which will prohibit every physician from using the re- 
sources of the drug-store — unless they are all compelled 
to go over to osteopathy. 

The question of the liquor trade and temperance — 
which is so widely different from a hasty prohibition — 
has engaged the minds of all times and of all nations, and 
is studied everywhere to-day with the means of modern 
science. But this spring flood of prohibition legislation 
which has overrun the States shows few signs of deeper 
connection with serious study and fewer signs of profit 
from the experiments of the past. When the Chinese 
government made laws against intemperance about eleven 
hundred years before Christ, it can hardly have gone more 
hastily to work than the members of this movement of the 
twentieth century after Christ. It is unworthy of women 
and men who want to stand for sobriety to allow them- 
selves to become intoxicated with hysterical outcries, when 
a gigantic national question is to be solved, a question 
which can never be solved until it is solved rightly. A 
wrong decision must necessarily lead to a social reaction 
which can easily wipe out every previous gain. 

Progress is to be hoped for only from the most care- 
ful analysis of all the factors of this problem; yet, instead, 



8o AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

the nation leaves it to the unthinking, emotional part of the 
population. In the years of the silver agitation the 
wonderful seriousness with which large crowds listened in 
a hundred towns, evening after evening, to long hours of 
difficult technical discussion on currency was a matter 
of admiration to any foreigner. Sixteen to one was really 
discussed by the whole nation, and arguments were arrayed 
against arguments before a decision was reached. Is it 
necessary that the opposite method be taken as soon as this 
problem is touched — a question far more complex and 
difficult than the silver question, and of far more import 
to the moral habits and the development of the nation? 
When leading scholars bring real arguments on both sides 
of the problem, their work is buried in archives, and no 
one is moved to action. But when a Chicago minister 
hangs the American flag over his pulpit, fastens a large 
patch of black color on it, declares that the patch stands 
for the liquor evil which smirches the country, denounces 
wildly the men who spend for whiskey the money which 
ought to buy medicine for sick children, and then madly 
tears the black cloth from the stars and stripes and grinds 
it under his heel — then thousands rush out as excited as 
if they had heard a convincing argument. And this super- 
ficiality is the more repellant because every glimpse be- 
low the surface shows an abundance of cant and hypocrisy 
and search for cheap fame and sensationalism and still 
more selfish motives mingled with the whole movement; 
even the agitation itself, with its threats of ruin, borders 



PROHIBITION AND TEMPERANCE 8i 

too often on graft and blackmail and thus helps to de- 
bauch the public life. 

Those who seriously study, not merely one or another 
symptom, but the whole situation, can hardly doubt 
that the demand of true civilization is for temperance and 
not for abstinence, and that complete prohibition must in 
the long run work against real temperance. But nothing 
is more characteristic of the caprice of the masses than the 
constant neglect of this distinction. Even the smallest 
dose of alcohol Is for them nothing but evil, and trium- 
phantly they seize on isolated statements of physiologists 
who acknowledge that every dose of alcohol has a cer- 
tain influence on the brain. This is at once given the 
turn that every glass of beer or wine " muddles " the brain 
and is therefore a sin against the freedom of man. 

Certainly every glass of beer has an influence on the 
cells of the brain and on the mind; so has every cup of 
tea or coffee, every bit of work and every amusement, every 
printed page and every spoken word. Is it certain that the 
influence is harmful because an overdose of the same stim- 
ulants is surely poisonous ? To climb Mount Blanc would 
overtax my heart: is it therefore Inadvisable for me to 
climb the two flights to my laboratory? Of course, under 
certain conditions it might be wise to take account of the 
slightest influences. Without being harmful, they might 
be unsuited to a certain mental purpose. If I were to 
take a glass of beer now in the morning, I should cer- 
tainly be unable to write the n^xt page of this essay with 



82 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

the same ease; the ideas would flow more slowly. But 
does that indicate that I did wrong in taking last night, 
after a hard day's fatiguing work, a glass of sherry and a 
glass of champagne at a merry dinner-party, after which 
nothing but light conversation and music were planned for 
the rest of the evening? Of course, alcohol before seri- 
ous intellectual work disturbs me; but hearing a hurdy- 
gurdy in the street or thinking of the happy news which a 
letter has just brought to me, or feeling angry over any 
incident, disturbs me just as much. It is all the same kind 
of Interference ; the brain centers which I used for my in- 
tellectual effort are for a while Inhibited and thus unfit for 
the work which I have In hand. When the slight anger 
has evaporated, when the pleasurable excitement has sub- 
sided, when the music is over, I can gather my thoughts 
again, and it is arbitrary to claim that the short blockade 
of ideas was dangerous, and that I ought to have avoided 
the music or the pleasure or the wine. 

Of course. If we consider, for Instance, the prevention 
of crime, we ought not to forget that some even of these 
slight Inhibitions may facilitate a rash, vehement deed and 
check cool deliberation. In times of social excitement, 
therefore, alcohol ought to be reduced. But again this 
same effect, as far as the temperate use of alcohol is In 
question, may result from many other sources of social un- 
rest. The real danger begins everywhere with Intem- 
perance : that Is, with a lack of that self-discipline which is 
not learned but lost under the outer force of prohibition. 

Psychologically the case stands thus : alcohol has indeed 



PROHIBITION AND TEMPERANCE 83 

an Inhibitory Influence on mind and body. The feeling of 
excitement, the greater ease of motor Impulse, the feeling 
of strength and joy, the forgetting of sorrow and pain — ■ 
all are at bottom the result of Inhibition; Impulses are 
let free because the checking centers are Inhibited. But 
It Is absurd to claim from the start that all this Is bad and 
harmful, as If the word Inhibition meant destruction and 
lasting damage. Harmful It Is, bodily and socially, when 
these changes become exaggerated, when they are pro- 
jected Into such dimensions that vital Interests, the care for 
family and honor and duty are paralyzed; but In the In- 
hibition Itself lies no danger. There Is not the slightest 
act of attention which does not Involve such Inhibition. If 
I read In my study, the mere attention to my book will in- 
hibit the ticking of the clock In my room and the noise 
from the street, and no one will call It harmful. As soon 
as my attention Increases, and I read with such passion that 
I forget my engagements with friends and my duties In my 
office, I become ridiculous and contemptible. But the fact 
that the unbalanced attention makes me by Its exagger- 
ated Inhibition quite unfit for my duties. Is no proof that 
the slight inhibition produced by attentive reading ought 
to be avoided. 

The Inhibition by alcohol, too, may have In the right 
place Its very desirable purpose, and no one ought to be 
terrified by such physiological statements, even If Inhibi- 
tion Is called a partial paralysis. Yes, It is partial 
paralysis, but no education, no art, no politics, no re- 
ligion, is possible without such partial paralysis. What 



84 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

else are hope and belief and enjoyment and enthusiasm 
but a re-enforcement of certain mental states, with cor- 
responding inhibition — that is, paralysis — of the op- 
posite ideas? If a moderate use of alcohol can help 
in this most useful blockade, it is an ally and not an 
enemy. If wine can overcome and suppress the con- 
sciousness of the little miseries and of the drudgery of 
life, and thus set free and re-enforce the unchecked en- 
thusiasm for the dominant ideas, if wine can make one 
forget the frictions and pains and give again the feeling 
of unity and frictionless power — by all means let us use 
this helper to civilization. It was a well-known philoso- 
pher who coupled Christianity and alcohol as the two 
great means of mankind to set us free from pain. But 
nature provided mankind with other means of inhibition ; 
sleep is still more radical, and every fatigue works in the 
same direction; to inhibit means to help and to prepare 
for action. 

And are those who fancy that every brain alteration is 
an evil really aware how other influences of our civiliza- 
tion hammer on the neurons and injure our mental pow- 
ers far beyond the effects of a moderate use of alcohol? 
The vulgar rag-time music, the gambling of the specula- 
tors, the sensationalism of the yellow press, the poker 
playing of the men and the bridge playing of the women, 
the mysticism and superstition of the new fancy churches, 
the hysterics of the baseball games, the fascination of 
murder cases, the noise on the Fourth of July and on the 
three hundred and sixty-four other days of the year, the 



PROHIBITION AND TEMPERANCE 85 

wild chase for success; all are poison for the brain and 
mind. They make the nervous system and the will end- 
lessly more unfit for the duties of the day than a glass of 
lager beer on a hot summer's evening. 

What would result if prohibition should really pro- 
hibit, and all the Inhibitions which a mild use of beer 
and wine promise to the brain really be lost? The psy- 
chological outcome would be twofold: certain effects of 
alcohol which serve civilization would be lost; and, on 
the other hand, harmful substitutions would set In. To 
begin with: the nation would lose Its chief means of 
recreation after work. We know to-day too well that 
physical exercise and sport Is not real rest for the ex- 
hausted brain-cells. The American masses work hard 
throughout the day. The sharp physical and mental 
labor, the constant hurry and drudgery produce a state 
of tension and Irritation which demands before the night's 
sleep some dulling Inhibition If a dangerous unrest Is not 
to set In. Alcohol relieves that dally tension most di- 
rectly. 

Perhaps no less important would be the loss on the 
emotional side, at least for the brain of man. The 
woman's more responsive psychological constitution does 
not need such artificial paralysis of the Inhibiting centers. 
The mind of the average woman shows by nature that 
lower degree of checking power which small alcoholic 
doses produce In the average man. Without the artificial 
inhibition of the restraining centers the life of most 
men becomes a matter of mere business, of practical 



S6 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

calculation and prosaic dullness. The aesthetic side of 
life cannot come to any development because it is sup- 
pressed by the practical cares. The truly artistic mind, 
of course, does not need such artificial help. The finest 
enjoyment of art, of literature and of music demands a 
mind in which the suggestion of beauty suppresses by it- 
self all selfish and practical ideas. But the mass of man- 
kind is differently organized. They need some kind of 
help to open their minds to the message of the unprac- 
tical and unselfish. Without such help their Instinct 
would lead them only to trivial and vulgar amusements. 
Truly the German, the Frenchman, the Italian, who en- 
joys his glass of light wine and then joyful and elated 
makes his pilgrimage to the masterpieces of the opera 
serves humanity better than the New Englander who 
drinks his icewater and then sits satisfied at the vaudeville 
show, world-far from real art. Better America Inspired 
than America sober, if soberness Is to mean absolute ab- 
staining! In the middle way between this kind of so- 
briety and Intemperance lies that emotional stimulation 
which for the hard-working masses Is an element of true 
civilization. Can we forget that In almost all parts of 
the globe even religious life began with cults of such 
artificial Inspiration? For the Hindus the god Indra was 
In the wine, and for the Greeks DIonysIus. It Is the 
optimistic exuberance of life, the emotional Inspiration 
which alcohol has brought Into the dullness of human 
days, and the history of culture shows on every page the 
high values which have resulted from It. 



PROHIBITION AND TEMPERANCE 87 

But with the emotion the will dries up. The Ameri- 
can nation would never have achieved its world work 
if the attitude of resignation had been its national trait. 
Those pioneers who opened the land and awoke to life 
its resources were men who longed for excitement, for 
the intensity of life, for vivid experience. The nation 
would not be loyal to its tradition if it were not to foster 
this desire for intense experience. The moderate use of 
alcohol is both training in such intensified conscious ex- 
perience and training in the control and discipline of such 
states. As a child learns to prepare for the work of life 
by plays and games, so man is schooling himself for the 
active and effective life by the temperate use of exciting 
beverages which playlike awake those vivid feelings of 
success. The scholar and the minister and thousands 
of other individuals may not need this training, but the 
millions may best prepare themselves for a national 
career of effectiveness, if this opportunity is not taken 
from their lives. History demonstrates this abundantly. 

To be sure all this is but half true, because as we said 
the individual and finally the nation may find substitutes, 
may satisfy the craving for emotional excitement, for will 
elation, for intense experience by other means. Gamb- 
ling and betting, mysticism and superstition, recklessness 
and adventurousness, sexual over-indulgence arid per- 
version, brutality and crime, divorce and vulgar amuse- 
ments, have always been the psychological means of over- 
coming the emptiness and monotony of an unstimulated 
life. Like alcohol they produce that partial paralysis 



88 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

and create intense experiences. As long as the social 
mind is not entirely dried up, they take hold of the 
masses with the necessity of a psychological law. 

Has not history experimented sufficiently? Prohi- 
bitionist stump speakers may tell us that their cause means 
the hitherto unheard-of progress of civilization; the 
United States, after abolishing slavery for mankind, is 
called on to end also the tyranny of alcohol under which 
humanity has suffered for ages. But are there not two 
hundred millions of Moslems who are obedient to Mo- 
hammed's law, that wine drinking is sinful? What is the 
outcome? Of course, it is not inspiring to hear the boast 
of the Moslems that the Christians bring whiskey to 
Africa and bestialize the natives, while the Mohamme- 
dans fight alcohol. But aside from this, their life goes 
on in slavery and polygamy and semi-civilization. All 
the strong nations, all those whose contributions have been 
of lasting value to the progress of mankind, have profited 
from the help of artificial stimulation and intoxicants. 

But every strong nation also remained conscious of the 
dangers and evils which result from intemperance. On 
the whole, history shows that intemperance and abstinence 
alike work against the highest interests of civihzation; 
temperance alone offers the most favorable psycho- 
logical conditions for the highest cultural achieve- 
ment. Intemperance mostly precedes the strongest 
periods in the life of a nation and follows them again as 
soon as decay has set in. Temperance, that is, sufficient 
use of intoxicants to secure emotional inspiration and vo- 



PROHIBITION AND TEMPERANCE 89 

lltlonal Intensity, together with sufficient training in self- 
discipline to avoid their evils, always introduced the fullest 
blossoming of national greatness. Instinctively the Ameri- 
can nation as a whole is evidently striving for such tem- 
perance, but a hysterical minority has at present succeeded 
in exaggerating the movement and in transforming it into 
Its caricature, prohibition. The final result, of course, 
will be temperance, since the American nation will not 
ultimately allow Itself to become an emasculated nation of 
dyspeptic Ice-water drinkers without Inspiration and en- 
ergy, or permit vulgar amusements, reckless stockgam- 
bllng, sensationalism, adultery, burglary, and murder to 
furnish the excitement which the nerves of a healthy nation 
need. 

How temperance can be secured, the experiences of the 
older nations with a similar psychological type of national 
mind ought to decide. First of all, the beverages of 
strongly alcoholic nature ought to be fought by those of 
light alcoholic effect. The whiskey of the laborers must 
be fought by light healthful beer and perhaps by light 
American wines. Further, a systematic education In 
self-control must set In; the drunkard must not be tolerated 
under any circumstances. Above all, the social habits 
In the sphere of drinking must be entirely reshaped. 
They belong to a period where the Puritan spirit con- 
sidered beer and wine as sinful and relegated them to 
regions hidden from decent eyes. The American saloon 
is the most disgusting product of such narrowness; its 
dangers for politics and law, health and economics, are 



90 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

alarming. The saloon must disappear and can be made 
to disappear perhaps by higher license taxation and many 
other means. And with it must disappear the bar and 
the habit of drinking standing and of mutual treating. 
The restaurant alone, with the hotel and the club, is the 
fit public place where guests sitting at tables may have 
beer and wine with their meals or after meals, — and all 
controlled by laws which absolutely forbid the sale of 
intoxicants to certain groups of persons, to children, to 
Inebriates, and so on. As long as drinking means to the 
imagination of a considerable well-meaning minority of 
the nation the present-day repulsive life of saloons and 
bars, the minority will find it easy to terrorize and to whip 
Into line the whole country. But If those relics of a 
narrow time disappear and customs grow which spread 
the spirit of geniality and friendly social intercourse over 
the foaming cup, the spell will be broken. Instead of 
being tyrannized over by short-sighted fanatics on the 
one side and corrupt saloon-keepers on the other, the 
nation will proceed with the unanimous sympathy of 
the best citizens to firm temperance laws which the sound 
Instinct of the masses will really respect. Training in 
self-control as against recklessness, training In harmless 
hilarity and social enjoyment as against mere vulgar ex- 
citement and rag-time pleasures, training in respect for 
law as against living under hysterical rules which cannot 
be executed and which Invite blackmail, corruption, and 
habitual disregard of laws ^ — these are Indeed the most 
needed influences on the social mind of the country. 



PROHIBITION AND TEMPERANCE 91 

EPILOGUE 

CINCE I uttered these opinions in a popular magazine, 
a whole literature of socalled replies has grown up. 
There was no lack of vehemence and an abundance of 
misstatement but I looked in vain for arguments which 
could change my fundamental opinion. Let us only see 
clearly the point at issue. 

We all agree that alcoholic intemperance is one of the 
greatest sources of human misery, being the direct cause 
of a large part of crime, of poverty, of illness, of insanity, 
of early death, and in the next generation, of idiocy and 
depravity. Without doubt we all further agree that the 
American saloon is a most atrocious insult to decent social 
life and that its Influence toward corrupt politics and 
toward intemperate habits is detestable. We all further 
agree that all alcoholic beverages are dangerous for chil- 
dren and psychopathies ; and we agree that to fight against 
such evils is the duty of every conscientious reformer. 

Thus our possible disagreement appears only when we 
consider the means by which these evils can be removed in 
the highest possible degree without introducing other evils 
equally calamitous. After studying this problem for more 
than twenty years, after repeating frequently in the psy- 
chological laboratory all the significant experiments and 
after curing scores of drunkards by psychotherapeutic 
means, thus being near to the question all the time, I am 
fully convinced that under the present conditions of 



92 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

American life the only wise way of reform is by working 
toward temperance and not toward prohibition. It must 
be a campaign of education toward a moderate use of light 
alcoholic beverages. 

Of course, I do not deny that the other side has a much 
simpler remedy. To exclude all alcohol from this country 
by prohibition laws seems to get rid of the evil at one 
stroke ; it indeed needs much less effort than a true educa- 
tion toward temperance. But the prohibition movement 
is just like the free silver movement in economics, or like 
socialism in politics, or like spiritualism in religion, or like 
Christian Science in medicine, or like pragmatism in 
philosophy. They all contain a little core of truth, but 
their truth is old and they become new-fashioned move- 
ments only by new sensational formulations which appeal 
to the unthinking crowd. But just this always secures at 
first an immediate cheap victory; a superficiality of think- 
ing prevails in the world and can never resist the enthu- 
siasm of fanatics. I have hardly any doubt that this 
prohibition movement too, will at first overwhelm by its 
very superficiality the sober efforts for education and re- 
form in this country, just as the vaudeville and the 
musical comedy have overwhelmed the serious drama, as 
the cheap magazine has demolished the bookstore, as the 
yellow press has captured the masses, and as in a hundred 
other forms the appeal to superficial judgment has been 
successful. Of course the reaction comes in time, and the 
cry for prohibition will disappear as the cry for free 
silver has disappeared; but much would be gained for 



PROHIBITION AND TEMPERANCE 93 

the true progress of the country If Instead of spasmodic 
zigzag movements all sober enemies of the saloon would 
advance in a straight line together. Otherwise the reac- 
tion against a victorious prohibition might too easily lead 
back to Intemperance. 

Let us not forget that we want to make laws for a 
nation whose habitual disrespect for the written statutes 
has proved In past years to be the chief source of its 
troubles, and further let us not forget that we want to 
legislate against a physiological desire which belongs to a 
majority of men. The absence of this desire in women 
or in a large number of men whose nervous system is 
differently organized can easily be misleading. I per- 
sonally, for instance, brought up in a temperance house- 
hold, have had all my life a physiological dislike not only 
for strong drinks but also for beer. But in planning for 
the millions I should feel reckless and irresponsible If I 
simply generalized my own chance constitution. I have 
no word against the socalled restriction of personal 
liberty; I know no right to personal liberty if it Interferes 
with the common good, but the more must I demand that 
this common good be determined by careful observation 
of the real facts. 

The kind of abstinence legislation which prevails in 
certain parts of the country and Is evidently near In others 
is surely not for the common good. That it destroys in- 
dustries and makes hundreds of thousands breadless and 
deprives millions of a harmless, joyful feeling is still the 
smallest harm which it produces. Far more important 



94 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

Is the disrespect for law which It creates. Prohibition 
puts a premium on the systematic violation of law and 
produces a form of corruption which Is still worse than 
the corruption which Irradiates from the licensed saloon. 
Furthermore It re-enforces drinking In Its most miserable 
and dangerous form. The moderate drinker Is cut off, 
while the Immoderate drinker Is created. It abolishes 
light wine and beer; and opens wide the way for the worst 
kind of whiskey. It eliminates all sound supervision and 
makes minors and Inebriates the favorite customers. A 
clean surface appearance Is bought at the price of Inner 
moral and mental destruction. 

Worst of all, the masses who feel the Instinctive need 
of an anaesthetic quickly find substitutes. I speak as a 
psychotherapist whose experiences cover the whole 
country when I say that the spreading of cocalnism and 
morphinism, of sexual perversions and ruinous habits 
among the abstainers Is alarming. But even on the sur- 
face anyone can see to what a degree of dullness on the 
one side and of vulgarity on the other the masses are led 
If the means of physiological relief are cut off from a 
strong, hardworking population. To fight Intemperance 
by prohibition means to substitute one evil for another; 
a reform by slow education toward a moderate use of 
light wine or beer, with complete abolition of the present 
saloon and of the present disgusting habits. Is the only 
way to permanent success In this country, as long as Ameri- 
cans remain Americans. 

The discussion Is also distorted when overemphasis Is 



PROHIBITION AND TEMPERANCE 95 

laid on the fact that a very large number of crimes are 
committed under alcohohc Influence. The reader Is made 
to believe that those same persons would be desirable 
law-abiding citizens, If they remained sober. The real 
situation Is less promising. We simply must acknowledge 
that a large number of minds offer Insufllclent resistance 
to unsound Impulse. The fact that those men Indulge 
in alcohol In an Intemperate way Is only one symptom of 
the same make-up which leads to misdemeanor and crime. 
Their Intemperance Is Itself a symptom of their anti- 
social tendency and in not a few cases the Impulse to drink 
with its resulting coarse pleasure is probably even a sub- 
stitute for antllegal impulses. Figures easily mislead 
there. In certain states much has been made for instance 
of certain statistics concerning the cigarette smoking of 
school children. It has been found that those boys who 
smoke are among the worst In the classroom and the 
campaign literature of the antlclgarette party jumps to the 
conclusion that the bad standing In the class is the result 
of the narcotic effect of the cigarettes. Here too, the 
much more natural conclusion is that those boys of the 
lower order who are unfit to do their duty well and who 
are anyhow bad In their standing in school on account of 
careless education without moral supervision are at the 
same time those who rush into the miserable habit of 
cigarette smoking. 

Of course, there are not a few who are convinced that 
alcohol Is ruinous for everyone, even in moderate quan- 
tities ; and it has become the fashion to support this belief 



96 AMERICAN PROBLEMS ' 

by the results of scientific investigations. I am convinced 
that there exists no scientifically sound fact which demon- 
strates evil effects from a temperate use of alcohol by 
normal adult men. Every claim on the one side has been 
disproved by just as important experiments on the other 
side. Even on physiological ground, everything is un- 
certain. Dr. Williams, of New York, tells us that al- 
cohol is never a food; and Dr. Dana, of New York, the 
president of the New York Academy of Medicine, tells 
us that alcohol is always a food. Dr. Williams writes 
that alcohol always lessens the power of work; and Dr. 
Dana writes that, as proved by recent experiments, alcohol 
has no effect, one way or the other, on the capacity to work 
if given in moderate daily doses. Dr. WiUiams writes 
that alcohol is the greatest evil of modern society; and Dr. 
Dana writes that the immediate removal of alcohol from 
social life would lead to social and racial decadence. 

But I, a psychologist, am naturally more interested in 
che mental side. Dr. Williams and so many others 
dogmatically assure us, for instance, that alcohol cuts off 
the power of mental production. But is a psychological 
laboratory really necessary to demonstrate the hollowness 
of such general statements? I know scores of men who 
never produce better than after a moderate use of al- 
cohol, and it is well known that this is true in exceptional 
cases even where immoderate use is indulged in. I had 
to hypnotize only recently a well-known New York author 
whose secret trouble is that he has never written a page 



PROHIBITION AND TEMPERANCE 97 

of his brilliant books except after intemperate use of 
whiskey. 

Dr. Williams assures us that moderate use of wine and 
beer reduces the powers of intellectual activity; and again 
the psychological experiment is said to have proved that. 
Here I must instinctively think of my teacher who has 
given to the world the methods of the psychological ex- 
periment, the greatest living psychologist. He is seventy- 
seven years old, has written about forty volumes which 
are acknowledged the world over as the deepest contribu- 
tions to psychological thought, wrote last year an epoch- 
making book; and yet for sixty years has taken beer and 
wine twice a day with every meal. Two summers ago 
I attended a number of international congresses and saw 
there at many banquets the leaders of thought from all 
nations. I watched the situation carefully but did not 
discover any abstainers among the sharp and great 
thinkers of any nation. 

To demonstrate that the abstainers enjoy clearer 
methods of thinking than such drinking scholars would 
indeed be an interesting experiment, but from the prohibi- 
tionist literature I cannot gain the impression that clear- 
ness of thinking is their particular strength. Typical of 
their lack of clearness Is the way In which they draw 
arbitrary consequences from real experiments. For In- 
stance, it is quite right to claim that alcohol makes our 
mental associations slower, but they interpret It as If that 
involved a destructive crippling of our mental life. 



98 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

They do not even ask themselves whether or not this 
retardation of association of ideas may not be a most 
helpful and useful relaxation of certain brain centers. 
With the same logic they might demonstrate to us that 
sleep is a most ruinous invention of nature, as it paralyzes 
our brain centers still more ; and they have not the slightest 
understanding of the fundamental fact that such an in- 
hibition in certain parts of the brain belongs to every 
single act of attention. They do not take the trouble to 
ask whether or not our associations are also changed 
through the digestion of a dry meal. 

With such careless misinterpretations of isolated ex- 
periments we could most easily demonstrate that every 
hour of physical exercise is ruinous for the higher mental 
life; or that the fatigue from the hearing of one hour's 
lecture makes mental cripples out of all of us. The fear 
of those who want to cut off a bottle of light beer from 
the evening meal of a hard working laborer on account of 
the psychological experiments is comparable only with 
the fear of the bacteriophobists. They would like to 
see every man live isolated in the middle of the ocean 
because in every other place the laboratory can demon- 
strate numberless microbes and bacteria. 

The only reasonable argument against moderate drink- 
ing by normal adult men is a fear that they may transcend 
wise limits. Yes, in the pamphlets written against my 
essay I confess the only word which made an impression on 
me was one contained in a Chicago pamphlet, which said 



PROHIBITION AND TEMPERANCE 99 

we must consider that Americans are reckless and carry 
everything to excess. But can that really be the attitude 
of a civilized nation? To legislate as if the citizens were 
irresponsible children, incapable of moderation, would 
mean a degradation of the whole country. With the 
same justice we might prohibit every sport because It be- 
comes ruinous to the organism if carried to an excess. 
To be sure the Americans are reckless and excessive; 
otherwise we should not have ten times more railroad ac- 
cidents than Europe, and gambhng and an absurd chase 
for money all over the land. But the only sound conse- 
quence is that every reformer should educate toward 
moderation in all fields. 

Prohibition removes every temptation. Hence It has 
no educative Influence whatever. To learn to be moder- 
ate Involves the development of will power which is ben- 
eficial In every walk of life. Only cowards who have no 
trust in their own will prefer to be removed from every 
temptation. I remember well a man who was president 
of an abstinence society for many years, and then used 
for medicinal purposes a glass of brandy. As he had not 
been trained In any moderation, the one glass stirred up 
a craving for more until he was lying In the gutter; and 
when he was brought to me to be hypnotized, he confessed 
that he had no will to abstain from over-indulgence. The 
campaign for temperance as against prohibition is a cam- 
paign for education which goes far beyond the special 
purpose, and works against excesslveness and recklessness 



loo AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

in every field. If all the enemies of the saloon and of 
intemperance were to unite on such lines of conservative 
progress, a real restoration to health and order might 
soon be secured; the radicalism of prohibition only delays 
reform until it may be too late. 



V 
THE INTEMPERANCE OF WOMEN 



V 

THE INTEMPERANCE OF WOMEN 

TT IS a wholesome movement which now turns energetic- 
ally against the evils of the American saloon. There 
may be disagreement as to the best ways and means, dis- 
agreement whether strict prohibition or a real education 
toward temperance is the more reliable method but there 
is hardly any disagreement as to the fact that the saloon 
in Its present form with its social, hygienic and political 
evils must be wiped out. The day for a widespread re- 
form in the direction of better social habits seems near and 
the women claim loudly that thanks for it is due to them. 
Their moral sense, they claim, has saved the country. 

But may it not be somewhat rash to acknowledge that 
the women have a special right to make such a claim, as if 
their temperance and their self-control, their moral sense 
and their social righteousness had won the victory over 
the indecency and intemperance, the selfishness and the 
disorderliness of men. They have made no particular 
sacrifice in abolishing the saloons where their husbands 
and sons and brothers enjoyed themselves, however il- 
lusory that enjoyment may have been. They did not have 
to carry on a moral struggle in pledging abstinence; they 
had never felt attracted by the rum barrel, they never 

103 



104 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

felt that particular craving for liquor which belongs to 
the organization of millions of men, but which has only 
seldom troubled a woman. 

Even the firmest believer In the equal rights of women 
cannot deny that there exist by nature certain bodily 
differences in the makeup of the sexes and that certain 
differences of Instinct and desire result from It. The long- 
ing for that feeling of elation and Illusory strength which 
alcohol furnishes most quickly has at all times and In all 
nations appeared as a characteristic, or call It a defect, 
or call It a vice of men. That the women abstain from 
that for which they do not care Is no cause for special 
moral admiration. 

But more than that, In fighting against the saloon the 
American woman works most directly for her own protec- 
tion. If the husband spends his money for gin the wife 
and children are deprived; If he poisons his mind by In- 
temperate use of whiskey the wife will suffer from his 
Irrational vehemence; If he has to pay the consequences 
of his craving behind prison walls the wife will be with- 
out a supporter. The short-sighted man may not see 
those evils, the weak man may deceive himself, but a 
woman cannot help seeing and feeling that her own ad- 
vantage and happiness are at stake. Her cry against the 
saloon Is thus a cry for help; It Is a struggle for her own 
personal comfort and safety; and there Is no reason for 
special praise and admiration for one who enters Into a 
selfish fight against the common enemy. 

If the question Is raised whether there Is a moral merit 



THE INTEMPERANCE OF WOMEN 105 

in the attitude of women toward this wrong of men we 
thus have to abstract entirely from the mere denunciation 
of the saloon and the drunkard. A moral merit which 
deserves praise would arise only If women were to set a 
good example, not by abstaining from liquor for which 
they do not care, but by abstaining from those harmful 
cravings which arise In female minds and by working with 
real self-denial for all those alms with which the saloon 
Interferes. If the millions of women were to show heroic 
abstinence, or at least reasonable temperance, with regard 
to their own destructive desires, their virtue would show 
the way for the sinful, stumbling man; but If they are 
Intemperate simply In the lines of their desires their out- 
cries against the intemperance of the thirsty are at least not 
Imposing. 

The women Insist, and they are right, that men waste 
their money in the saloon, and spend thus, for their own 
selfish enjoyment, that which ought to be saved for the 
family. Prohibition alone, they say, will prevent the man 
from throwing away by drink In a night hour what he has 
earned by his hard day's work. Of course, that is a 
strictly economic question which must appeal even to the 
most cruel heart when women tell us that the husband 
spends for his whiskey what ought to be used on medicine 
for the sick babies. But are we perfectly sure that it 
would really have been spent for such a noble cause, for 
the satisfaction of a serious need or for wise saving In the 
family's interest — and not, perhaps, for the woman's 
new hat? Economic questions must be cleanly dealt with 



io6 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

from an economic point of view. Can there be any doubt 
for the neutral onlooker of American society on every 
social level that man's squandering of money for bever- 
ages which he enjoys is still outdone by woman's squander- 
ing of money on gowns which she enjoys? And there is 
only a mild extenuation of this egotism in the altruistic fact 
that she hopes that he, too, will enjoy her gowns. To 
say that the millinery stores and the dressmakers profit 
from the luxury, stands on no higher economic ground 
than the fact that the drinker gives handsome profit to the 
bartender and the distiller. 

From the higher economic point of view the sums which 
the feminine micmbers of the American family are spend- 
ing on their exterior decoration are entirely out of pro- 
portion to those which are given for wholesome food, for 
care of the body, for books and culture, for service and 
art, for a wise saving or for the public good. No other 
civilized nation indulges in such waste as this which has 
become the craving of the fairer half of the nation. 
It is the one thing which the overfashionable lady of re- 
finement shares with the wife of her tradesman, shares 
with her most ignorant kitchen girl, and shares with the 
wife of the most ordinary working-man. The whirl- 
wind changes of fashion are treated like sacred duties. 

It may rightly be insisted by the prohibitionists that the 
pleasure from wine and beer is illusory, as no lasting 
happiness is attached to it; but is there a more illusory 
happiness than that of carrying to church the largest 
ostrich plumes on one's hat? To demand that the hus- 



THE INTEMPERANCE OF WOMEN 107 

band save his money and overcome his thirst that the 
wife may spend it for the satisfaction of her craving vanity 
is economically no change for the better. 

To be sure, the women will say: '' Our fight against 
the drinking of men is not only a problem of spending 
and saving. Much more important than the mere 
economic aspect is the social one. Alcohol ruins the work- 
ing power of man and thus makes him inefficient; it dulls 
his interest and his feeling of responsibility; the drinker 
cannot live up to his duties toward his work, toward his 
family, toward his community, toward his country. We 
want temperance for these reasons higher than mere 
money saving." All that is very true, but it suggests 
again the counter question : Where is the temperance of 
the women in all those functions which destroy the 
woman's efficiency and the woman's work for the home 
and the country? Where is their self-denial, when their 
temptation comes for dulling the mind and for under- 
mining their energies? Let us consider the case a little 
more closely. 

What is, after all, the pernicious effect of an Intemper- 
ate use of alcohol? Why does the man rush to dangerous 
acts, and why is he unable to connect his thoughts care- 
fully and to think of all the consequences, as soon as his 
brain Is poisoned by whiskey ? It means simply this : Al- 
cohol has the power of paralyzing In every brain those 
centers which check and regulate the actions of the brain 
nerves. The physiologist calls this checking Influence 
" inhibition," and he would say alcohol prevents the 



io8 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

centers of inhibition from doing their work. In every 
sober man plenty of impulses come up, but he can in- 
hibit them; if the organism is poisoned by liquor this 
inhibition fails and the impulse rushes to action. Practi- 
cally every single disturbance of alcoholic intemperance 
results from such loss of inhibition. It is as if the 
supervisor had gone to sleep and all the ideas and im- 
pulses do just as they please without control and connec- 
tion. The craving of man for alcohol results just from 
the fact that in his sober life these inhibition centers are 
very strongly at work. They make man efficient for great 
tasks, but as this represses the freedom of his impulses 
and the free play of his ideas he sometimes longs to get 
rid of this supervising master in his mind. Women do 
not have this longing because their inhibition centers are 
by nature less active. Woman is therefore somewhat 
more emotional and less deliberate. Much of the fem- 
inine charm results from this weaker development of the 
inhibitory region in the brain. Woman does not feel it 
as a disturbance, and therefore has no use for alcohol. 

But to be efficient in life, to do our work with energy 
and to do it well, much more, of course, is needed than 
mere supervision and regulation. We need, above all, at- 
tention and effort; we must be excited from brain centers 
which furnish the strength and the energy for our thoughts 
and acts. If those attention centers were not at work our 
impulses would become flabby, our thoughts would be con- 
stantly shifting, our ideas would remain superficial, we 
should lack the power to hold anything steadily before 



THE INTEMPERANCE OF WOMEN 109 

our minds and to overcome resistance and to live up to 
our duty. These attention centers are the real well of our 
higher life, they give to our personality its true meaning 
and character. No brain destruction could be worse than 
the paralysis of those centers. 

And yet just here sets in the craving of the woman, and 
with a thousand devices she tries to subdue and to render 
Ineffective these attention centers which trouble her as 
much as the Inhibition centers trouble her husband. 
There are many ways to render these attention centers 
Inactive. For instance, they can very easily be dulled and 
benumbed and almost put to sleep by a continuous repeti- 
tion of monotonous faint impressions, a kind of hypnotiz- 
ing of the attention. Or It can be done by constantly 
rushing from one thing to another, each just making a 
fugitive Impression on the mind which is not connected by 
a firm act of attention with that which went before and 
with that which is to follow. Instead of expressing it in 
such terms of physiological psychology let me state it 
practically by some Illustrations. 

If, for Instance, a man came to my office and com- 
plained that he had such a strong feeling of reserve, duty 
and discipline that he would like to get rid of all these in- 
hibitions quickly, I should give him as a prescription: 
*' My dear man, go Into the next saloon and drink a whole 
bottle of whiskey and all that discipline and order and 
sense of duty will quickly be abolished.'^ 

If, on the other hand, his wife came to my office and 
should complain that, whatever she undertakes, she puts 



no AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

her serious attention into it, and makes an energetic effort 
to do it as well as she can, and strives with her whole 
personality toward high ideals which demand her full 
power of mind, then I should say: " My dear woman, 
of course we must abolish such a lamentable state, and I 
shall give you my prescription. Please begin at first by 
always sitting in a rocking-chair, which by its monotonous 
movement has a very nice hypnotizing influence. Take 
care also that you have a box of candy always at hand; 
this constant nibbling will aid splendidly in the dulling 
of your attention. If you do not feel too elegant for it 
I can also recommend chewing-gum. Then be careful 
with your reading. You must never read a book where 
one chapter demands that you hold before your mind 
what you have read in the foregoing chapter. The right 
thing for you is to take a half a dozen illustrated magazines 
at a time and to glance over the pictures; you may read 
somewhat more carefully the advertisements, here and 
there you might peep into an article, but take care that 
there is no inner coherence In what you are reading. It 
is hardly necessary to advise you seriously to avoid any 
theaters where the plays have a plot in the old-fashioned 
way. Farces and musical comedies, In which you never 
knov/ what they are talking about, are exactly the things 
which you need, if you supplement them from time to 
time by a few hours In a continuous vaudeville show. As 
to your social Intercourse, you will be reasonable enough 
to abstain from earnest conversations; but afternoon teas 
in which you talk with two hundred persons in three- 



THE INTEMPERANCE OF WOMEN iii 

quarters of an hour can be quite helpful to you. Of 
course, you will not bother yourself with the education of 
your children, but you may get good fun out of them, 
especially if you amuse yourself with them In ridiculing 
their teacher. 

" Yet I am afraid that there will still be lots of empty 
time which ought to be filled in the service of our cure; 
and I recommend to you, therefore, something which is 
still better than the ' patent medicines ' in which you be- 
lieve, namely. Bridge. That has already cured the most 
desperate cases of serious attention. It is well to accom- 
pany this by going shopping from time to time without 
the aim of buying anything In particular, yet finally buy- 
ing something which you do not need and do not care for. 
If your purse allows it, by all means use your motor-car 
much; it is very unsafe to pass through the country In 
the slow pace which allows an attentive contemplation of 
Nature, but I am sure your chauffeur will take care that 
every impression will rush through your mind without 
leaving any trace. I know some of your friends recom- 
mend also whirhng through Europe, spending every night 
in a different hotel. Indeed that is not bad; but you must 
surely take care that you do not plan more than six days 
for Italy — one and a half Is certainly enough for Rome. 

" If you are of more moderate means do not despair ! 
You can have It all without paying for any automobiles. 
The least expensive and yet most effective road Is to 
devote yourself to public questions without studying them. 
Decide the problems of the community over your cup of 



112 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

tea. There is always some nice fad on the way for abolish- 
ing arithmetic from the ischools or for educating the 
Hottentots; and it is so delightful to talk about it all. 
Believe me, my dear woman, all this will cure you just 
as safely and just as quickly as your husband is cured 
from his trouble by his full bottle of whiskey. He will 
not be at home much, but, believe me, you will not either ; 
and he will feel happy in his tipsiness and you will feel 
happy in your ^ engagements.' " 

But is it necessary that I write out such a prescription? 
The man has found his way to the saloon by instinct, 
and the craving of the woman for the dulling of her at- 
tention has been satisfied by instinct, too. And yet no one 
seems to understand that temperance is in the one case 
quite as necessary as in the other. The alarming effect of 
the intemperance in satisfying sucK a craving is just as ruin- 
ous for the community in the one case as in the other. 
The personal efficiency is lost by such a pace in a woman's 
life, the home Is neglected, the moral development of the 
children is not cared for, the money is wasted and pubhc 
life is damaged — just the same effects as those which the 
saloon produces. Yes, public life is damaged, for it is 
ruinous indeed for the community if such superficiahty 
wins the day. On the one side the institutions and crea- 
tions of the nation are dragged down by becoming ad- 
justed to such flabby inattention. The literature is 
written more and more for readers whose span of atten- 
tion Is ineffective. The American stage becomes one 
great national vaudeville. There are more theaters in 



THE INTEMPERANCE OF WOMEN 113 

New York to-day than In Berlin; but in the German city 
twenty times more Shakespeare is played than in the 
Anglo-Saxon. On the other hand, the public questions, 
as soon as such superficial women mix in in masses, come 
more and more under the influence of emotional whims; 
instead of serious study we have hysterical explosions, 
spasmodic efforts, useless zigzag movements. 

Yes, is not even the part which women play in the 
public movement toward the abolition of the saloon 
typical of this superficial sort of action? The problem 
of freeing the community from the evils which result from 
man's intemperance is with us and cries out for solution. 
If it were left to experts who would thoroughly study the 
economic and social, the hygienic and psychological con- 
ditions, steady progress could be hoped for. If instead 
of It an emotional and whimsical treatment is preferred 
in which the problem is handed over to those who are 
Influenced by mere feeling, the outcome must be one for 
which the community will pay heavily by turbulent reac- 
tions and unforeseen damages. The problem of Intem- 
perance, like any other serious problem, cannot be solved 
by Intemperance of emotion. If a true reform is to come. 
It must be on both sides. The sermon of self-discipline 
and of self-restraint Is needed by women and men alike. 



VI 
MY FRIENDS, THE SPIRITUALISTS 



VI 



T T has been a great surprise to me. When I came to my 
first seance with Eusapia Palladino, I expected to see 
that disagreeable Italian peasant woman whom the news- 
papers had so often described as coarse and ordinary, un- 
educated and vulgar. Instead, I found a lady who must 
have been unusually beautiful in youth, with a delicate 
humor around her eyes, with an expression of sympathy 
and almost of brilliancy in her face, with a vivacity and 
cleverness which would have attracted me in any parlor.. 
This impression grew, and it was emphasized by seeing 
how much she evidently suffered from the efforts of the 
seances. I am glad that this sympathy is mutual. When 
she saw me for the first time, I shivered at the thought 
that some of my sins of skepticism might express them- 
selves on my forehead; her telepathic gift might tell her 
something of all the bad things which I printed once be- 
fore about the spiritualists. But my fear of disaster was 
quickly dispelled. With her inimitable charm she at once 
pointed to me as the one whom she wished to have at her 
best side. She is left-handed, and most of the wonder- 
ful phenomena occur on her left side. I was to sit at 
her left with one hand holding her left hand and with the 

117 



ii8 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

other hand holding her knees under the table while her 
left foot was resting on my foot. A friend of mine was 
holding her right hand and controlling her right foot. 

I am happy to say this quick touch of sympathy be- 
tween spiritualistic mediums and me is an old story. I 
still remember how quickly I became intimate at a recep- 
tion in Paris with a delightful English lady, who did 
not know me and whom I did not know, as in the noise 
of the festivity we were introduced without understanding 
one another's names. We were so happy that night ; and 
I never have forgotten the shock which dear old Mr. 
Myers, the venerable head of the psychical researches, 
received when he suddenly discovered that his famous 
medium was in such unholy company. I had, and I have, 
really the best intentions toward them, and I sometimes 
feel quite ashamed to think what ungrateful things I have 
uttered about their gifts. To be sure, sometimes they 
have treated me badly, too. How unkind, for instance, 
was Mrs. Holland, whose trance-writings are so care- 
fully reported in the Proceedings of the Society for 
Psychical Research ! She once wrote in her automatic 
writing, '^ Hugo — H. M. — Minsterberg — Hugo," but 
Instead of honoring me by the flattering hypothesis that 
she might have heard my name before, she refused this 
possibility; it was the spirit of the late Richard Hodgson 
who had reported my name to her from another world. 
But In any case, if there is in the spiritualistic heaven more 
joy over one sinner who repenteth, the spirits must have 
enjoyed it greatly, when on that stormy night in the 



MY FRIENDS, THE SPIRITUALISTS 119 

Lincoln Square Arcade, New York City, I sat down hold- 
ing the knees of Madame Palladino. 

Seriously speaking, It was not an easy decision for me to 
accept Mr. Hereward Carrlngton's Invitation to take part 
In an investigation of Madame Palladlno's famous 
powers. I had, indeed, refused such urgent requests 
through all my psychological career. I have not con- 
sidered It a part of scientific psychology to examine the 
socalled mystical occurrences. Just because I have always 
been interested In the abnormal borderland regions of 
mind, in hypnotic and hysteric phenomena, I have been 
anxious to draw a sharp demarcation line between such 
abnormities of mental behavior and the spiritualistic 
claims. 

When I arrived in this country, the cult of Mrs. Piper 
was flourishing, and I was urged from all sides to study 
her sensational case. I saw at once that If I began that 
inquiry at all, I should have to devote myself to It with 
an energy which would absorb all my time and power. 
To visit such seances only as a kind of entertainment 
under loose conditions would have been without any value 
for science. On the other hand, too many experiences 
of others warned me against any concentration of efforts 
on that problem. The only clean way seemed for me to 
stay away from it entirely. Since those early days, hardly 
a week has passed by in which I have not been urged to 
examine some mystical case. But I have remained loyal 
to my program and refused consistently all contact with 
the mystical phenomena. I have never hesitated to ex- 



I20 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

plain my standpoint publicly, and I have been more than 
glad to see how in the last decade this attitude of caution 
has spread more and more ; and especially, that the discus- 
sion on psychotherapy has become liberated from the 
mystical admixtures. 

On the other hand, in spiritualistic circles the accusa- 
tions grew in warmth. The favorite condemnation was 
that people like me demonstrate by their behavior a 
" shallow dogmatism " which is no less unworthy than the 
most superstitious mysticism. It is the duty of a psy- 
chologist to examine the totality of mental occurrences, 
and he has no right to close his eyes on that which seems 
to transcend our present powers of explanation. I heard 
this so often and so impressively that I finally yielded. I 
simply said : " Madame Palladino is your best case. She 
is the one woman who has convinced some world-famous 
men. I never was afraid of ghosts ; let them come ! " 

Of course this change in my action by no means meant 
a change in a fundamental conviction which contributed 
much to my previous reluctance. I do not refer to any 
philosophical or theoretical conviction, but to the practical 
one that I myself am entirely unfit for such an investiga- 
tion. There the public is usually under the influence of 
a curious illusion. Most people think that a scientist is 
especially adapted to carrying on such an inquiry, and 
if a great scholar becomes convinced of the genuineness of 
the performance, the public looks on that as a strong argu- 
ment. I am inclined to think that scholars are especially 
poor witnesses in such a case. They are trained through 



MY FRIENDS, THE SPIRITUALISTS 121 

their whole life to breathe in an atmosphere of trust. 
The scientist who experiments in his laboratory and studies 
the laws of physics or chemistry or biology has not the 
slightest reason to be afraid that nature will play tricks 
or resort to fraud. And not only is the material which 
he studies always genuine, but his collaborators in his 
workshop are as reliable, as far as good-will and honesty 
are concerned, as he himself. 

If there were a professor of science who, working with 
his students, should have to be afraid of their making 
practical jokes or playing tricks on him, he would be en- 
tirely lost. If he weighs his chemical substances, he Is 
not accustomed to watch whether one of the boys has a 
scheme to pull down the lever of the scale. Such methods 
may be at home in the custom house, but no sugar trust 
enters into a theoretical laboratory. Everything is done 
in good faith, and there Is perhaps no profession which 
presupposes the good faith of all concerned so instinctively. 
The lawyer is on the lookout, the physician has to examine 
whether the hysteric patient Is telling him the truth, the 
business man hardly expects always to hear the whole 
truth, the politician is skeptical, the journalist does not 
believe anything ; but the scientist lives in the certainty that 
everyone who enters the temple of science considers truth 
the highest godhead. And now he, with his bland 
naivete and his training In blind confidence, is again and 
again called to make Inquiries which would demand a 
detective and a prestidigitator. 

Moreover, the best scientific work in one field is not 



122 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

the slightest guarantee for good observation In another 
field. It Is often remarkable to what a degree a man 
who Is a great scholar In one division may be not only 
Ignorant, but uneducated in his attitude, silly in his judg- 
ment and foolish In his conclusions in fields which lie out- 
side of his interests. Finally, there must be much of a 
temperamental factor in inquiries of this kind. It is curi- 
ous how much temperamental similarity exists among those 
scholars who have felt attracted to the mysterious field 
and who have given dignity to it by their famous names. 
They represent mostly a splendid type of men, but men 
who from a psychological point of view would have to 
be labeled as " negatively suggestible." The psychologist 
knows negative suggestibility very well. He designates 
by that name those minds which are inclined to prefer 
just the opposite of what Is suggested to them. Positively 
suggestible persons blindly accept whatever is offered; 
in the sphere of science they simply follow the herd and 
repeat what Is told by the master ; they are entirely under 
the control of the prevailing opinions. The negatively 
suggestible persons do just the opposite. They have their 
prejudices no less, but they have them just In favor of that 
which is the opposite of the prevailing opinion. If every- 
body eats meat, they believe In vegetarianism ; If everybody 
calls the doctor, they are sure that healing without drugs 
is right. 

What I saw was Palladino's regulation perform- 
ances as they have been described a hundred times. I 
saw them under favorable conditions. Before she en- 



MY FRIENDS, THE SPIRITUALISTS 123 

tered the room, I had full opportunity to examine in my 
naive way the setting of the scene. There was the usual 
partition with the little board cabinet built in. In front of 
the cabinet were the two black curtains, behind the cur- 
tains in the cabinet a light little table, a guitar and some 
other musical instruments. The chair in which the me- 
dium was to sit stood about a foot from the curtains and 
in front of it the table at which she was to hold her hands, 
a very light, roughly-made table without outstanding 
edges. And besides eight chairs and a large scale for tak- 
ing the medium's weight, there was no other furniture in 
the room with the exception of a desk at which a young 
stenographer did her recording work. The circle of the 
participants was beyond suspicion, men and women who 
were honestly interested in examining the genuineness of 
the phenomena. Some of them were able to speak Italian 
fluently, an ability which contributes to the medium's good 
humor. We examined the part of the room behind the 
partition, saw the electric burglar alarm which is attached 
to the windows in order to exclude the possibility of out- 
side help ; we studied the arrangements by which the vari- 
ous intensities of light were produced and we were well 
supplied with electric flashlights and similar devices for 
clearing up the mystery. 

Mr. Hereward Carrington, who has brought the me- 
dium from Naples to New York and who has arranged 
all the seances, welcomed us and gave us every opportunity 
to examine carefully whatever we wanted to study. He 
is at present the most active prophet of Madame Palladino. 



124 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

His sittings with her in Naples, where he went as a skeptic 
and returned as an enthusiast, have been described with 
scientific exactitude In the last November volume of the 
Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research in Eng- 
land. They are the most detailed account of all that 
happens In Madame Palladino's presence. Mr. Carring- 
ton has still more recently published a whole volume on 
the Italian woman, giving the complete history of her re- 
markable career, and has succeeded In stirring up unusual 
interest In this country by the discussion of her case In 
magazines and newspapers. There Is no need of saying 
that most of the occurrences which I have seen, and which 
so many others have watched since Palladino's " controll- 
ing spirit, John," took quarters In New York, might rather 
easily be understood, if Mr. Carrington himself were In 
the game. Suspicions of this have been raised from many 
sides, and the commercial character of the whole enter- 
prise, constantly covered In the newspapers by references 
to the so called scientific committee, has very naturally 
strengthened these suspicions. It would have been better 
to have put that scientific committee at work from the very 
start instead of postponing Its action more and more. 

I am glad to say frankly, that I consider Mr. Carring- 
ton beyond suspicion. I have no telepathic gifts and do 
not know what Is at the bottom of his mind, but as far as 
my experience with men goes, I feel sure that he would 
not consciously aid In any fraud. If he is putting on 
fa mask, it is much more that he gives himself the air of a 
scientific inquirer, where his real attitude has become that 



MY FRIENDS, THE SPIRITUALISTS 125 

of the faithful believer. When during the performance 
in the darkened room he begins In his broken Italian to beg 
John to stretch out his arm behind the curtain, he seems 
much more in his natural element than when he speaks 
about physical energies. Nor have I any suspicion of the 
stenographer, nor do I for a moment admit the idea that 
anyone climbs in during the performance. Exactly the 
same performances have been produced by our medium 
in rooms in which there were no windows at all behind 
the cabinet. But I may go further. Those clumsy tricks 
with which the amateur detectives in the Sunday papers 
have explained the occurrences are to be ruled out too. 
It is simply absurd to say that she has large hooks in her 
sleeves with which in the darkened room she pulls the table 
upward. These good men do not even know that these 
so called levitations of the table occur in full electric light 
with every chance to see her arms and sleeves and to move 
one's hands between the table and her body. 

The first act of the performance is indeed essentially 
filled by phenomena of table lifting in strong, electric light. 
The reports show that the circle sometimes has to sit an 
hour or two before the spirits begin their work. It was 
not so with us. At my first meeting we sat hardly three 
minutes before the legs of the table on one side began to 
lift themselves, then on another side, always falling back 
suddenly after a few seconds, and finally the whole table 
went into the air while our hands touched It only lightly 
and her own hands were often entirely removed from its 
surface. Little interplays were given by mysterious rap- 



126 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

pings of the table. Slowly occasional hiccoughs indicated, 
as we had often read, that she was beginning to enter 
into a deeper trance, and the table rapped five times, which 
means that the spirit John demands weaker light. The 
room was darkened and only a few seconds later the second 
act began. It was still light enough to see the faces of all 
as white spots in the room, but not light enough to rec- 
ognize features. As usual a strong breeze blew suddenly 
from the cabinet. I felt it distinctly on my face and one 
of the two black curtains which were hanging about a foot 
behind the back of the medium was blown on the table 
about which we formed our circle. Throughout this per- 
formance in the dark her two hands, as well as her knees 
and her feet, were held by two reliable members of our 
circle. The curtain was put back and very soon the little 
table in the cabinet behind the curtain was thrown up and 
fell down on the floor with a loud crash, and one dramatic 
event followed another. 

In the meantime, four raps of the table in the well- 
known signal code of the spirits kept giving the order that 
the members of the circle should talk more. Suddenly 
the little table began to creep out of the cabinet into the 
sitting-room, the guitar gave out some tones, and her im- 
mediate left-hand and right-hand neighbors were touched 
sometimes on the arm, sometimes on the back, and some- 
times they felt a hand pull their sleeve. Now the little 
table began to climb up from the floor and to reach as 
high as the elbow of one of us, and finally John pressed 
his hand and arm from the cabinet against the curtain. I 



MY FRIENDS, THE SPIRITUALISTS 127 

myself had left the circle and stood behind the medium 
with a hand on the curtain, and distinctly felt how the cur- 
tain bulged out with strong energy. I should not have 
called It the arm of John, but I did feel a sensation as if a 
mysterious balloon was heavily pressing against the curtain 
from behind. In short, I have seen with my own eyes 
and heard with my own ears and felt with my own epi- 
dermis the essentials of those phenomena which have con- 
verted men like Lombroso and after him so many other sci- 
entists. Yet I for one am no nearer to spiritualism than 
I ever have been. And if some of my spiritualistic friends 
claim that I ought to have waited until still stronger phe- 
nomena appeared, like those which occurred so often In 
Naples and part of which can be seen in Carrlngton's re- 
port, I venture to contradict. After seeing the milder 
feats I had not the slightest doubt that the more surprising 
acts have been observed by the descrlbers. It makes not 
the slightest difference whether I personally see the hand 
coming out and ringing a bell and the arms growing out 
of the shoulder and the head of the medium looking over 
the curtain with a neck three feet long. I am sure that 
if I had spent some weeks more I, too, should have ex- 
perienced these extreme performances which I can so 
easily Imagine from the printed reports. If I had seen 
them all myself, my stand toward the whole matter would 
not have been changed, and my opinions are based as 
much on what others observed as on what I myself found. 
Yes, I confess that I should be less skeptical If those 
stronger occurrences did not exist and if nothing hap- 



128 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

pened but that which arose in my presence. I am afraid 
the more convincing in the eyes of the spiritualists my 
seances might have been, the less they would have con- 
vinced me. 

After all, what is the situation ? A table is moving with- 
out any visible contact. According to the bolder theory, 
it happens by the action of a spirit. But more conserva- 
tive thinkers say that it Is simply an unproved theory that 
these movements are brought about by the spirits. Other 
facts, they say, may make such a theory probable, but the 
movements themselves only suggest that a physical energy 
is at work there which science does not know as yet, a 
supernormal function of the organism. If we ask why 
only so few persons have this energy by which tables and 
chairs can be made to move through the air without con- 
tact, we justly hear that we have no right to prescribe to 
nature which substances shall have particular powers. 
Have we not discovered quite peculiar energies, for In- 
stance, In radium and thorium which no other substances 
in the world have ? Radium is not the trillionth part of 
the earth. Why may It not be that among hundreds of 
millions of men just one or another organism has peculiar 
powers too? And If we modestly answer that we cannot 
understand a kind of physical energy which would work 
in such a surprising way, then we are sure to open the whole 
flood of eloquence which has so often streamed through the 
spiritistic sermons. Did we know of wireless telegraphy 
a hundred years ago? Did we know of hypnotism? 
Did we know the Roentgen rays? Has not every day 



MY FRIENDS, THE SPIRITUALISTS 129 

brought us entirely new discoveries ? Has not the whole 
view of the physical world been changed In every century? 
Have we a right to prescribe that just this kind of energy 
has no place In the household of physical nature ? Ought 
we not to take a more modest attitude, willing to learn ? 

We have heard this so often that It has thrown a kind 
of spell on all of us and we are ready to follow on this 
path. All right, we say. So far, we have not the slight-, 
est Idea how an organism can Irradiate this kind of energy, 
but the future may bring us more light. But now our 
friends the spiritualists to whom we have given our little 
finger grasp at once for the whole hand and in the next 
moment they have the entire arm. If such a woman has 
an energy to move the table, an energy which we do not 
yet understand and which no physicist has recognized, can 
not this energy also move the air sufficiently to bulge the 
curtains and to pick the strings of a guitar, and to touch the 
shoulder of a neighbor and to make a wind blow out of 
her forehead? Of course it can. But, add our friends, 
Is it not very arbitrary to stop there? If there is a mys- 
terious power which moves the air, this means that it 
pushes the molecules and atoms in the universe under the 
control of the woman's body. Is there any different prin- 
ciple involved, if we frankly admit that one new grouping 
of the molecules Is then just as possible as another? We 
cannot deny it ; and here we are landed where our friends 
want to bring us. If a hand or an arm appears through 
the curtain, Is It anything else but a special grouping of 
molecules? Could not that energy group the atoms in 



I30 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

such a way that they appear as a new face? Must we not 
therefore acknowledge that it is simply a more complex 
case of such unknown energy which shows the materializa- 
tion of persons of whom the medium is thinking? Those 
persons may not have independent existence of their own. 
Perhaps they can materialize only through the thought of 
the woman who has these mysterious powers. All this 
is quite justified. If we allow the first step, It may indeed 
be difficult to say why we should hesitate before the hun- 
dredth step in that direction. If we accept the principle, 
we must accept the consequences. Our surprise at the 
hands and faces which fly through the air in the darkened 
room and touch us on the shoulder and kiss us on the cheeks 
is no wiser than the surprise of an African savage who 
sees a locomotive or an airship. 

All right. But let us at least understand clearly that if 
we accept this revised universe, then really nothing of 
value remains in that poor sham edition of the world with 
which science and scholarship have wasted their efforts 
so far. If at any moment a third arm can grow out of 
our shoulders in order to tickle a neighbor, and if a 
woman can prolong her neck three feet in order to show 
her face over the curtain, if a head can suddenly become 
as small as a fist and then bulge out again, then it is simply 
silly to fill our libraries with that old-fashioned knowledge 
which so far we have called physics and biology. From 
the standpoint of natural science we have to begin anew. 
We must go back to a view of nature which fits well into 
the ideas of the savages all over the globe, and the effort 



MY FRIENDS, THE SPIRITUALISTS 131 

of mankind to work out a sort of knowledge which Is to 
eliminate the spirit theories of the primitive peoples has 
been nothing but a colossal blunder. We may be ready 
to acknowledge that; but can we really be blamed If before 
this death sentence on the scientific reason Is fulfilled our 
condemned Intellect at least makes use of every possible 
reprieve and of every opportunity to Insist on a new trial? 
Is It really surprising If before we give up hope altogether, 
we cry out, " Fraud ! " 

Those who think that fraud is a harsh word and who 
think that it would be nicer to admit that a table may lift 
Its legs, really ought to keep those enormous consequences 
in mind. And those who smilingly say, " Of course the 
hands and faces and the materializations are humbug, but 
the minor things may be admitted," cannot blame us if 
we apply their own principle for the whole field and ask 
at first In all modesty: are we not victims of claptrap and 
tricks? I know the reply: " Show us the tricks ! " But 
would it really be a proof that there Is no trick involved 
even if I had no hypothesis? 

Hundreds of thousands have seen Houdlni and have 
not the slightest Idea how he Is performing his feats. I 
acknowledge frankly that when I grasped the curtain be- 
hind Madame Palladlno's back and suddenly felt there a 
sort of balloon or bag pressing against my hand I was 
startled and had no Idea how she did it. It reminded me 
of a similar feehng which I had a depresslngly long while 
ago. I was seven years old. It was In my native town 
at the yearly fair and I was sitting In the first row In the 



132 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

tent of a magician. He suddenly took my hat and pulled 
a lot of ribbons out of it. I laughed and felt sure that It 
was a trick, but just before he was to return my hat, right 
before my eyes he pushed his finger through the crown. 
I distinctly saw how it pierced through it and I felt sure 
that my new hat was ruined. A moment later the hat was 
safe in my hands with not the slightest hole In It, and I 
have never understood how he did it. My lasting won- 
der became less torturing, however, when I heard later 
that the apparatus for that trick costs two dollars and 
fifty cents. To be sure if It Is fraud, an abundance of 
ever-changing schemes must be supplied. Every moment 
must suggest new tricks, and only a woman with unusual 
skill, unusual talent, unusual strength, unusual resource- 
fulness and unusual ability to deceive and to mislead could 
go through these performances undetected for a single 
evening. But just such a woman is Madame Palladino. 

,The first Impression of the whole sitting is one of an 
atmosphere of trickery. The performance goes on In a 
hall which abounds In psychics and clairvoyants and the 
room Itself suggests the cheapest claptrap. Yet as I said, 
I have not the least suspicion of outside help. But now 
the performance begins. She had not held her foot on 
mine two minutes, and I believed from my touch sensations 
that she had not removed It at all, before I discovered 
with my hand that she had exchanged her feet. I do not 
know how she did It so rapidly without my noticing It. 
Furthermore, I was sure that her hand was holding mine, 
her fingers lying on the back of my hand. Only In a 



MY FRIENDS, THE SPIRITUALISTS 133 

natural way from time to time to change the fatiguing po- 
sition she removed it just for an instant, and if I had not 
watched it carefully, I should have entirely disregarded 
such a momentary interruption of the tactual sensation. 
And yet I found that for her even such a moment was 
sufficient to make a quick movement toward her body. 
She has a control of her muscle system which is simply 
marvelous. Even if she raps the top of the table with 
her knuckles, she can produce sounds of an intensity which 
is astonishing, and which indicate a strength of her motor 
apparatus that no one would expect in her. In a corre- 
sponding way her senses are evidently h3^eraesthetic. It 
seems to me that the sharp reaction movements with which 
she responds to any sudden light are not simulated, and I 
suppose, therefore, that she has unusual powers of dis^ 
crimination. While she apparently hardly watched the 
company she observed most carefully every little occur- 
rence, and evidently can always rely on an abnormal sensi- 
tiveness of her ears. 

On the other hand, if the conditions are of a kind that 
even the best senses could not notice a change, she is just as 
little able as any normal person to find out a deception. 
Then she herself becomes the victim, as if no spirits assisted 
her. To give a typical illustration : When the room was 
light and everything depended upon the greatest concen- 
tration of our attention on the table in order to prevent 
our noticing any tricks which she might perform with the 
curtain, she told us repeatedly that nothing could happen 
if we broke the chain. That Is, each must touch with his 



134 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

hands the hands of his two neighbors ; as soon as she saw 
that the chain was interrupted, the phenomena stopped. 
But when she did not see it, the interruption had not the 
sHghtest effect. In agreement with one of my neighbors, 
we held our hands so that from across the table it looked 
as if we were touching, while in reality we bent our fingers 
inward and had several inches distance between our hands. 
During that period of breaking the chain, the phenomena 
came plentifully and she herself repeated that they came 
because the chain was good. But as I said she was always 
carefully on the lookout. In my first seance when I stood 
at the curtain, she promised that the hand of John would 
grasp me through the curtain from the inside of the cabinet, 
and she made all the preparations which suggested that 
John was willing. But with her quick side-glance she evi- 
dently noticed that I did not stand there as motionless as at 
first appeared to her. In the almost complete darkness I 
was slowly moving my leg upward, standing on one foot 
and moving the other up as high as her shoulder, covering 
the space between her and the curtain. From the moment 
of her head movement which I recognized in the faint 
light, John changed his intentions and I waited in vain for 
the curtain performance. 

I do not in the least wish to suggest that I really know 
how she is doing all of her tricks. Some facts were to 
me extremely suspicious. I noticed, for Instance, while 
I was sitting at her side, that every time before a levitation 
of the table began, she arranged something between her 
knees under her clothes. It was often only a quick move- 



MY FRIENDS, THE SPIRITUALISTS 135 

ment as if she were pressing a button, but I never saw the 
levltation without such a preparatory action, though the 
knees themselves which I held with my hand were kept en- 
tirely quiet. Moreover, frequently she arranged the folds 
of her skirt around the legs of the table as If some forceps 
were to hold the table leg from below the gown. Yet I 
acknowledge frankly that I saw some movements of the 
table In which I could not discover any contact with her 
clothes. But It must not be forgotten that the most char- 
acteristic feature of her performances Is just the unexpected 
variety. Phenomena occur just In the Instant when you do 
not expect them and when your attention Is turned to 
something else. When you think that the right leg of the 
table will rise up, suddenly the left legs are In the air, and 
as soon as you have ever seen the whole table going Into 
the air, you entirely forget that the lifting of two legs only 
can just as well be produced by tilting it under the pressure 
of the hand. In short, the many things which you forget, 
or to which you do not attend, or which you wrongly ex- 
pect, or which you mix up, or which you Involuntarily 
inhibit, or which you supplement by your Imagination 
play an extremely large part in the whole performance. 
We must keep in mind that we have to do with a woman 
who has specialized In these very performances for thirty 
years. Always the same silly, freakish, senseless pranks 
repeated on thousands of nights before small groups of 
mpre or less superstitious people under conditions of her 
own arrangement, conditions entirely different from ordi- 
nary life, with poor illumination and with complete free- 



136 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

dom to do just what she pleases. Is it surprising that a 
certain virtuosity is secured which understands how to ad- 
just the performance in every moment to the special people 
and their special mood and to be prepared for every new 
emergency? Nevertheless, not everyone would be able 
to learn the trade which is paid at the rate of five hundred 
francs an evening. She is a great artist, and as a vaude- 
ville show she may be at the head of the profession, but I 
do not see how she can overcome in any cool observer the 
feeling that it is trickery. 

If I abstract from my own chance experiences and think 
of that large storehouse which Mr. Garrington and his 
friends have filled with their careful observations and of 
all those wonderful feats which impressed Flammarion 
and Lombroso and so many others, my suspicions would, 
on the whole, turn in two directions. In the first place, 
she certainly tries to set free one hand or one foot and 
with them to produce a number of phenomena. It is 
not by chance that the spirit John, however manifold 
and convincing his performances may be, has never suc- 
ceeded in doing anything which was more than three 
feet distant from the body of the medium. And sec- 
ondly, I think that her comfortable black cloth gown with 
which she sits in the dark before the black curtain protects 
a number of skillful technical devices which she controls 
by her muscles. Now it is true that her observers assure 
us constantly that such cannot be the case because her hands 
are held, her feet are held and her knees are held. She 
would therefore be unable to work the instrument even 



MY FRIENDS, THE SPIRITUALISTS 137 

If It were hidden on her body. But that is a very mis- 
leading objection. Let us remember how the Oriental 
women dance. They call It dancing when their feet may 
be standing quiet on one spot and their hands may be quiet 
behind their heads. The muscles of the abdomen and 
of the chest are nevertheless effective and can be just 
as well regulated to do as exact work as the hands and 
feet. Moreover, there would be room for a pair of bel- 
lows between arm and chest or between the legs, and such 
bellows in connection with a little tube system could quite 
well produce most of the phenomena. 

The most curious group of her phenomena Is that of 
producing a breeze either under her gown so that the skirt 
suddenly bulges out or on the curtain so that the curtain 
flies into the room, or from her hair. It is evident that 
any slight connection of a rubber or metal tube with a pair 
of bellows under the arm or under the bodice could produce 
such effects without any movement of hands or feet. It 
Is in harmony with this view that all the breezes around her 
occur together with violent contractions of her whole body. 
Whenever she Is preparing an unusual event, she Is strain- 
ing her arms with all her unusual force. She herself and 
her friends interpret It as a pumping up of spiritual en- 
ergy. It seems to me more probable that she cannot pro- 
duce those stronger abdominal muscle effects without con- 
tracting at the same time the arms and legs. Even the 
hiccough with which her deeper trance begins speaks In 
favor of this, as It Is a cramp In the diaphragm which 
may result from the abdominal action. There Is hardly 



138 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

a doubt that she Is really exhausted at the end of every 
seance, and that she is In full perspiration. It certainly 
Is not easy work. Finally, let us not forget that the 
more surprising phenomena almost never occur at the 
first seances. Only when Madame Palladino has worked 
with the same persons repeatedly do the better events 
arise. There were no heads for me, but I should certainly 
have worked up to those heads if I had as much time 
for this as some of my predecessors. She becomes slowly 
acquainted with the tendencies, suspicions and inclinations 
of her clients, and those clients in spite of their best will 
become more and more suggestible. As soon as a few 
unexplained events have occurred in the first seance, the 
second Is approached with a greater willingness to accept 
the miraculous, and the attention is more easily diverted, 
so that some points which at first would have been watched 
are now disregarded. 

It is true Madame Palladino has been asked to undress 
a few times, and she also generously permitted the ladles 
of our seances to examine her clothes. The Naples report 
tells In detail how she went to the outer room with two 
ladies and took off some of her clothes. Of course, all 
that means nothing whatever. First, those bellows, of 
which I have suspicions, might be embedded in such a 
way that when they are empty of air they would appear 
to be a mere lining, and even metal tubes might appear 
to be simply wires at the belt. And moreover, a woman 
of such wonderful resourcefulness would really not have 
the slightest difficulty In undressing slowly In such a way 



MY FRIENDS, THE SPIRITUALISTS 139 

that whatever she wanted to hide could be removed or 
kept hidden on her body itself, so that a few untrained 
ladles might easily be deceived. It Is most wonderful 
how her charm and humor remove all Indiscreet curiosity. 
To be sure when two ladles of our party at the beginning 
of the second evening of my seances examined her clothes 
rather carefully behind the partition, they did not find 
any bellows, but just this result favors my theory, since 
after the search, throughout the whole long evening, 
not the slightest breeze was felt, no bulging, no wind 
from the hair or below the table. Evidently the apparatus 
was removed when the undressing began and could not 
be restored. On the other evening, the wind blew every 
few minutes. 

Of course, I may be on an entirely wrong track and 
the mechanism may be of quite a different order. But 
I have not the least sympathy with those who tell me 
that even though every single one of her acts might be 
explained by some complex trick, we must after all ac- 
knowledge that there Is something genuine, because it Is 
so much simpler to settle all by one common explanation 
through an unknown mystical energy than to invent a 
complicated theory of tricks for every single feat. This 
Is just that misleading way of arguing for which the 
world has so often had to pay the penalty. There are 
too many people who always believe that if there are 
many cases of which each one is almost proved, their 
cumulation is a complete proof. As long as each case 
in itself still allows the slightest possibility of a different 



I40 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

interpretation, the whole sum of the cases remains un- 
convincing. We know how long it was demonstrated 
that life could develop itself out of unliving substance, 
because it was so often shown that animals originated 
in water in which there was almost no chance that germs 
had entered from without. A thousand such almosts 
did not help. When really the entrance of germs is 
absolutely prevented, organisms have never developed. 

As long as there is a possibility of explaining every 
single miraculous event in some way by some kind of 
trick hypothesis, we need not be afraid that the mere 
summing up of ten thousand such cases is a demonstration 
that causal explanation is not in order. I have my doubts 
whether a complete demonstration of Madame Palladino's 
methods will ever be possible. She will not work under 
other conditions than those which she by long training 
and adjustment has found to be most favorable for her 
game, and under such conditions an investigation in the 
highest sense of the word is entirely impossible. More- 
over, the fact that she is at liberty at any moment to 
change the program and to bring in always the unex- 
pected numbers of the show enhances the difficulties. 

I have not even sympathy with the efforts to raise the 
level of the investigation by introducing subtle physical 
instruments. That gives to the manifestations an unde- 
served dignity and withdraws the attention from the 
center of the field. The events are treated as if a really 
new energy were involved which we should study in the 
way in which we examine the Becquerel rays. An exact 



MY FRIENDS, THE SPIRITUALISTS 141 

measurement of those movements only shifts the attention 
away from the woman and her Inexhaustible supply of 
tricks. I was delighted at seeing a little letter scale in 
the room. It had been used to find out whether by 
merely holding her hands on each side of the little tray 
in which the letter is usually placed she would be able 
to produce a pressure. I felt that that would be a very 
clean demonstration. I heard that Madame Palladino 
had really been asked for that demonstration. It was 
a new task, but with her wonderful quickness she had 
found her way out. She held her hands on each side of 
the tray; the scale showed that a mystical pressure was 
exerted on the top of the tray, and one of the observers 
with his high scientific carefulness moved his finger around 
the tray and convinced himself that there was nowhere a 
contact between the hands and the plate. But the nar- 
rator added that he himself had seen that she had a hair 
tied to her two little fingers and the hair pulled on the 
lower part of the scale while the little fingers moved down- 
ward. No physical instruments can measure such trickery 
unless we first learn an entirely new adjustment, for which 
the scientist as such has no schooling. A master detective 
might do better. 

Of course, there will be some who In reply will fall 
back on their old outcry that all this is dogmatism and 
that instead of mere theories of explanations they want 
actual proof. I am afraid I must be still clearer there. 
I must report what happened at the last meeting which I 
attended. 



142 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

One week before Christmas at the midnight hour I 
sat again at Madame Palladino's favorite left side and 
a well-known scientist on her right. We had her under 
strictest supervision. Her left hand grasped my hand, 
her right hand was held by her right neighbor, her left 
foot rested on my foot while her right was pressing the 
foot of her other neighbor. For an hour the regulation 
performance had gone on. But now we sat in the 
darkened room in the highest expectancy while Mr. 
Carrington begged John to touch my arm and then to 
lift the table in the cabinet behind her; and John really 
came. He touched me distinctly on my hip and then 
on my arm and at last he pulled my sleeve at the elbow. 
I plainly felt the thumb and the fingers. It was most 
uncanny. And finally, John was to lift the table in the 
cabinet. We held both her hands, we felt both her 
feet, and yet the table three feet behind her began to 
scratch the floor and we expected it to be lifted. But 
instead, there suddenly came a wild, yelling scream. It 
was such a scream as I have never heard before In my 
life, not even in Sarah Bernhardt's most thrilling scenes. 

What had happened? Neither the medium nor Mr. 
Carrington had the slightest Idea that a man was lying flat 
on the floor and had succeeded in slipping noiselessly like a 
snail below the curtain into the cabinet. I had told him 
that I expected wires stretched out from her body and he 
looked out for them. What a surprise when he saw that 
she had simply freed her foot from her shoe and with 
an athletic backward movement of the leg was reaching 



MY FRIENDS, THE SPIRITUALISTS 143 

out and fishing with her toes for the guitar and the table 
in the cabinet! And then lying on the floor he grasped 
her foot and caught her heel with a firm hand, and she 
responded with that wild scream which Indicated that she 
knew that at last she was trapped and her glory shattered. 

Her achievement was splendid. She had lifted her un- 
shod foot to the height of my arm when she touched me 
under cover of the curtain, without changing In the least 
the position of her body. When her foot played thumb 
and fingers the game was also neat throughout. To be 
sure, I remember before she was to reach out for the 
table behind her, she suddenly felt the need of touching 
my left hand too, and for that purpose she leaned heavily 
over the table at which we were sitting. She said that 
she must do it because her spiritual fluid had become too 
strong and the touch would relieve her. As a matter 
of course, in leaning forward with the upper half of her 
body she became able to push her foot further backward 
and thus to reach the light table, which probably stood 
a few inches too far away. 

After this scream, at least let us not repeat the ridicu- 
lous excuse that she sometimes uses tricks when by chance 
genuine phenomena do not arise, but that she can perform 
the same acts at other times by mere spiritual powers. 
No. We had here the perfectly typical performance. 
Everything occurred in exactly the same style as in previ- 
ous seances and the conditions of supervision were the 
best which she allows at all. To put your foot on hers 
is never allowed, as the poor woman has a nervous 



144 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

" weakness " In her Instep. Thus the only allowed super- 
vision of her feet Is In being sure all the time that her 
foot Is on yours. I did Indeed feel her shoe all the time. 
When the scream occurred and her foot was caught, I 
distinctly felt that her shoe was pressing my foot. A 
hook on the right shoe probably pressed down the empty 
left shoe. If her foot had not been caught that per- 
formance would have been the best In the whole seance 
and the cabinet mysteries worked In our presence would 
never have been under stricter conditions. Moreover, 
this foot performance without any motion of the upper 
half of the body evidently presupposes a continued and 
perfect training. Here she was trapped for the first 
time In an act which cannot possibly be explained as an 
accidental occurrence; such marvellous athletics must be 
explained as a regular lifework. Her greatest wonders 
are absolutely nothing but fraud and humbug; this Is nO' 
longer a theory but a proven fact. 

I have spoken of fraud, and yet I do not want to be 
misunderstood. I do not think It at all necessary. Indeed, 
I even consider It Improbable that Madame Palladino, 
In her normal state is fully conscious of this fraud. I 
rather suppose It to be a case of a complex hysteria In 
which a splitting of the personality has set In. We know 
to-day that the hysteric double personality has no 
mysterious character whatever, that it results from 
certain abnormal Inhibitions In the brain — pathological 
disturbances which are nearly related to the phenomena 
of attention, of sleep, of hypnotism, and so on. Such 



'Mii^U/ 



MY FRIENDS, THE SPIRITUALISTS 145 

a split-off personality may enter into the most complex 
preparations of trickeries and frauds, may carry them 
through with a marvelous alertness, and yet as soon as 
the normal personality awakes, the whole hysteric action 
IS forgotten. I suppose that a hysteric disease with com- 
plex anesthesias is responsible for her whole life history. 
When as a Httle girl she saw the chairs and tables moving 
around her while she was sweeping the room, she prob- 
ably passed through experiences which she interpreted in 
the way most natural to her. What really happened 
was probably that she violently moved the furniture with- 
out perceiving her own movements and without intention. 
Her lower brain-centers had reached a hysteric inde- 
pendence and from this simple starting-point probably 
that complex secondary personality developed itself, and 
I sincerely believe that she is fully convinced of her own 
mysterious powers. It is not she who plays the tricks; 
It Is her Irresponsible split-off consciousness which focuses 
on those silly performances. It Is a fraud for which no 
one Is to be blamed as It belongs In the sphere of the 
hospital. 

Our friends have one refuge left They tell us that 
our stubborn will to detect fraud Instead of acknowledg- 
ing mystic powers Is a kind of philosophical short- 
sightedness. It Is an over-estimation, they say, of 
natural science and the merely physical aspect of the 
universe. They denounce It as materialism, If we try 
to resist their theory of spirit materialization. But I am 
afraid their last defense Is their weakest. In this they are 



146 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

right: Materialism is indeed an impossible philosophy. 
Materialism is nothing but a certain theory of natural 
sciences, necessary in natural science but entirely unfit for 
an ultimate view of reality. Such a view can be given 
only by idealism. 

To be sure, some of our friends have a leaning toward 
a half philosophy which is neither materialism nor ideal- 
ism, and which is nowadays often labeled pragmatism. 
There is nothing absolute, nothing eternal, they say, and 
truth Is only that which fits our purposes. But just such 
pragmatists ought to resist the spiritualistic pseudo- 
science with all their energies. Their philosophy ought to 
tell them that there cannot be any help or any hope for 
our purposes in the conception of a world which is per- 
vaded with happenings which even the official prophet of 
Madame Palladino calls " preposterous, futile, and lack- 
ing in any quality of the smallest ethical, religious or 
spiritual value." 

Millions and millions have to die every year because 
some parts of their bodies are diseased. They could be 
helped and could live on if some slight changes in the 
organisms could be effected, changes which the physician 
cannot effect because the laws of nature limit the actions 
of the body. And now we are to believe that in reality 
the good-will of the spirits is not bound by such a law, 
that a neck can become three feet long, that a third arm 
can grow out of the shoulder, in short, that any trans- 
formation of the body can be secured. And the smallest 



MY FRIENDS, THE SPIRITUALISTS 147 

part of such radical bodily changes could have saved those 
millions who had to die. 

But I am not a pragmatist. With every fiber of my 
conviction I stand for idealism in philosophy, as far from 
materialism as from pragmatism. I believe that our real 
life Is free will, bound by ideal standards which are 
absolute and eternal. The truth Is such an eternal goal. 
.We have to submit to it and not to choose it as the 
pragmatist fancies. But the obligation which truth forces 
on our will does not come from without as the materialist 
Imagines; It Is given by the structure of our own truth- 
seeking will. The mere experience of life Is not truth. 
We gain truth only by shaping the life experience In the 
service of our Ideals of reason. Human knowledge has 
to remold and reshape the material experience until It 
forms itself In scientific theories In such a way that a 
world of order and law Is constructed. Our own truth- 
seeking will thus determines beforehand what forms of 
thought must mold experience In order to give to It the 
value of truth. Our own reason thus lays down before- 
hand the real constitution of the only possible world 
which can be an object of knowledge, and It Is not enough 
that our friends the spiritualists come and simply answer 
with the famous political words : " What Is the con- 
stitution among friends?" The constitution of our 
reason Is indeed everything for our possible world ex- 
perience, and whatever facts may come to us with the 
claim to be true, the constitution which our logic has 



148 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

established must decide whether they can be accepted 
or must be remolded until they are acceptable. If we 
disregard this constitution, then it has no value and no 
meaning even to discuss the possibility of disregarding 
it. We should not know whether we understand one 
another. We should not know whether that which I 
mean does not mean the opposite to you. We should 
plunge into mere absurdity. The principle of ultimate 
truth must be sought In our own logic and reason and 
no philosophy can be found by watching the psychic of the 
Lincoln Square Arcade. 



^S' -JJ!' X jL^ J aT-giL 



VII 
THE MARKET AND PSYCHOLOGY 



VII 

THE MARKET AND PSYCHOLOGY 

A LONG time before New York and Chicago were 
discovered, there lived an alchemist who sold an 
unfailing prescription for making gold from eggs. He 
sold it at a high price, on a contract that he was to refund 
the whole sum In case the prescription was carried through 
and did not yield the promised result. It is said that 
he never broke the contract and yet became a very rich 
man. His prescription was that the gold-seeker should 
hold a pan over the fire with the yolks of a dozen eggs 
in it and stir them for half an hour without ever thinking 
of the word hippopotamus. Many thousands tried, and 
yet no one succeeded. The fatal word, which perhaps 
they never had thought of before, now always unfortu- 
nately rushed into their minds, and the more they tried 
to suppress it, the more it was present. That good man 
was a fair psychologist. He knew something of the laws 
of the mind, and although he may have been unable to 
transform eggs into gold, he understood instead how to 
transform psychology into gold. Psychology has made 
rapid progress since those times in which the alchemist 
cornered the market, but our modern commerce and In- 
dustry so far have profited little from the advance. 

151 



152 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

Goods are manufactured and distributed, bought and sold ; 
at every stage the human mind is at work, since human 
minds are the laborers, are the salesmen, are the buyers; 
and yet no one consults the exact knowledge of the science 
that deals with the laws and characteristics of the human 
mind. 

How curiously this situation contrasts with our practical 
application of physical science! We can hardly imagine 
a state in which we should allow the scholarly physicist 
to have steam engines and telegraphs in his laboratory 
rooms and yet make no effort to put these inventions to 
practical use in the world of industry and commerce. 
But just that is the situation in the world of mental facts. 
The laboratories for the study of inner life flourish, ex- 
periments are made, inventions are tested, new vistas are 
opened; but practical life goes on without making use of 
all these psychological discoveries. It is, indeed, as if 
the steam engine were confined to the laboratory table, 
while in the practical world work were still done clumsily 
by the arms of slaves. 

The only fields in which the psychical experiment has 
been somewhat translated into practical use are those of 
education and medicine. The educational expert has 
slowly begun to understand that the attention and the 
interest of the school child, his imitations and his play, 
his memory and his fatigue, deserve careful psychological 
study. The painstaking studies of the laboratory have 
shown how the old teacher, in spite of his common sense, 
too often worked with destructive methods. Whole 



THE MARKET AND PSYCHOLOGY 153 

school plans had to be revised, the mental hygiene of 
the school-room had to be changed, educational prej- 
udices had to be swept away. 

In a similar way psychological knowledge gradually 
leaked Into the medical world also. The power of sug- 
gestion, with all Its shadings, from slight psychothera- 
peutic Influence to the deepest hypnotic control. Is slowly 
becoming a tool of the physician. The time has come 
when It Is no longer excusable that our medical students 
should enter professional life without a knowledge of 
scientific psychology. They do not deserve sympathy if 
they stand aghast when quacks and mystics are successful 
where their own attempts at curing have failed. It can 
be foreseen that reform in this field is near, and it may 
be admitted that even those healing knights errant have 
helped to direct the public Interest to the overwhelming 
importance of psychology In medicine. For education 
and medicine alike the hope seems justified that the 
laboratory work of the psychologist for the practical 
needs of men will not be In vain. 

We are much farther from this end In the field of law. 
Certainly the psychologist knows better than any one 
that he has neither a prescription to remove crime from 
the world nor an Instrument to see to the bottom of the 
mind of the defendant or to make the witness speak noth- 
ing but the truth. Nevertheless, he knows that an 
abundance of facts has been secured by experimental 
methods which might be helpful In the prevention of 
crime, in the sifting of evidence, and In the securing of 



154 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

truthful confession. Every word of the witness depends 
on his memory, on his power of perception, on his sug- 
gestibility, on his emotion; and yet no psychological 
expert is invited to make use of the psychological 
achievements in this sphere. But even here there are 
signs of progress, for interest in the problems involved 
seems wide awake. 

It is strikingly different with the whole field of economic 
activity. The thousandfold importance of psychological 
studies to the life of the workshop and the mill, of the 
store and the household, has not yet attracted public 
attention. On the whole, commerce and industry seem to 
take good care of themselves, and seem little in the mood 
to philosophize or to beg advice of a psychological ex- 
pert. Here and there they have taken a bit of laboratory 
knowledge and profited from it, without realizing that 
such a haphazard plunge into psychology can hardly be 
sufiicient. For instance, no railway or steamship com- 
pany would employ a man who is to look out for signals 
until he has been examined for color-blindness. The 
variations of the color sense in men are typical discoveries 
of psychological experimentation. But even here the ex- 
pert knows that the practical tests of to-day represent, on 
the whole, an earlier stage of knowledge, and do not 
progress parallel to laboratory study of the varieties of 
color-blindness. Further, the transportation companies 
ought not to limit their signal tests to trials of the color 
sense. It is perhaps no less important that the man on 
the engine should be tested as to the rapidity of his re- 



THE MARKET AND PSYCHOLOGY 155 

actions, or the accuracy of his perceptions, or the quickness 
of his decisions. For the examination of each of such 
mental capacities the psychological laboratory can furnish 
exact methods. Moreover, the transportation companies 
should have no less interest In studying with psychological 
experiments the question of what kind of signals may 
be most appropriate. For Instance, psychologists have 
raised the important query whether it is advisable to have 
different railroad signals In the daytime from those at 
night. The safety of the service demands that the correct 
handling be done automatically, and this will be secured 
the more easily, the more uniform the outer conditions. 
Experiment alone can determine the Influence of such 
variations. 

Even this small psychological group, the use of signals 
for transportation companies. Is not confined to visible 
Impressions. An abundance of effort Is nowadays con- 
centrated on the fog-horn signals of ships, but no one 
gives any attention to the psychological conditions for 
discriminating the direction from which a sound comes. 
In our psychological laboratories widely different experi- 
ments have been made concerning the perception of 
sounds with reference to direction and distance. We 
know, for Instance, that certain Illusions constantly enter 
Into this field, and that the conditions of the ear, and 
even of the ear-shell, may produce Important modifica- 
tions. Yet no one thinks of studying with all the avail- 
able psychological means the hearing capacities of the 
ship ojfEcer. A difference in the two ears of the captain 



156 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

may be no less disastrous than the inability to discrimi- 
nate red and green. 

Another field in which a slight tendency to consult the 
modern psychologist has set in is that of advertising. 
Many hundreds of millions are probably wasted every 
year on advertisements that are unsuccessful because they 
do not appeal to the mind of the reader. They may be 
unfit to draw his attention, or may be unable to impress 
the essentials on his memory, or, above all, may not suc- 
ceed in giving the desired suggestion. The reader 
glances at them without being impressed by the desirable 
qualities of the offered wares. 

The evident need of psychological guidance has affected 
a certain contact between empirical psychology and busi- 
ness in this field. The professional advertisement writer 
to-day looks into the psychology of suggestion and atten- 
tion, of association of ideas and apperception, and profits 
from the interesting books that cover the theory of ad- 
vertising. Yet every row of posters on the billboards 
affords plenty of material for studying sins against the 
spirit of psychology. Perhaps there sits in life-size the 
guest at the restaurant table and evidently rejects the 
wrong bottle, which the waiter is bringing. The ad- 
vertiser intends to suggest that every passer-by should be 
filled with disgust for the wrong brand, while the only 
desirable one is printed In heavy letters above. What 
really must happen Is that the advertised name will as- 
sociate itself with the Imitated inner movement of rejec- 



THE MARKET AND PSYCHOLOGY 157 

tlon, and the rival company alone can profit from the 
unpsychological poster. 

But, anyhow, the application of general psychology to 
the problem of advertising can be only the beginning. 
What is needed is the introduction of systematic experi- 
ment which will cover the whole ground of display, not 
only in pictures and text, but in the shop windows and 
the stores. The experiment may refer to the material 
Itself. Before an advertisement is printed, the arrange- 
ment of words, the kind of type, the whole setting of the 
content, may be tested experimentally. The electric 
chronoscope of the psychological laboratory can easily 
show how many thousandths of a second the average 
reader needs for reading one or another type, and other 
experiments may demonstrate how much is apperceived 
during a short exposure, and how much kept in memory, 
and what kind of involuntary emotional response and 
muscle reaction is started by every kind of arrangement. 
The trade journals not seldom show specimens of skillful 
and of clumsy schemes of advertising, and yet all this re- 
mains dogmatic until experiment has brought out the 
subtle points. 

But much more important than experimenting with the 
concrete material is the experimental study of the prin- 
ciples Involved. This is, after all, the strength of the 
experimental method in all fields, that the complex facts 
of life are transformed into neat, simple schemes in which 
everything is left out but the decisive factor. If the 



158 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

jeweler wants to display his rings and watches in the 
window in such a way that the effect of the largest pos- 
sible number will be produced, it is not necessary that we 
experiment for him with costly timepieces and jewelry. 
For instance, we may place twenty little squares of paper 
on one sheet of black cardboard, and on another from 
sixteen to twenty-four. After short exposures we ask our 
subjects to decide on which sheet there are more squares. 
If the squares on both sheets are arranged in the same 
way the observer will see at a glance that eighteen are 
less than twenty, or twenty-two more than twenty. But 
by trying very different combinations and studying the 
effect of different groupings, we shall soon discover that 
with certain arrangements the twenty look like only seven- 
teen, or, with better arrangements, like twenty-two or 
twenty-three. In the same way we may study the effect 
if we mix squares and circles, or have squares of various 
sizes, or some of uniform, some of different color. In 
short, in the most simple form of experiment we can find 
out the principles that control the Impression of the 
passer-by as to the greater or smaller number he believes 
himself to see. 

The effort to attract the customer begins, of course, 
not with the storekeeper and the salesman, but with the 
manufacturer. He, too, must know psychology in order 
to make his article as persuasive as possible. Since I be- 
gan to give my attention to the application of psychology 
to commerce and labor, I have collected a large number 
of wrappings and packings in which the various Industrial 



THE MARKET AND PSYCHOLOGY 159 

establishments sell their goods, and have received plenty 
of confidential information as to the success or failure 
of the various labels and pictures. Not a few of them 
can be tested quite exactly, inasmuch as the article itself 
remains the same, while the make-up for the retail sale 
changes. The same quality and kind of toilet soap or 
chocolate or breakfast food or writing paper that in 
the one packing remained a dead weight on the store 
shelves, in another packing found a rapid sale. 

Much depends upon the habits and traditions and upon 
the development of taste among the special group of cus- 
tomers. But I am inclined to think that if the material 
is analyzed carefully the psychological laboratory can 
predict beforehand failure or success with a certain safety. 
As a matter of course, such factors cannot be reduced 
to a few simple equations. There is no special color com- 
bination that is suitable for chocolates and soap and 
chewing-gum alike, and the same color combination is not 
even equally fitting for both summer and winter. And 
still less can the same head of a girl be successfully used 
to advertise side-combs and patent medicines and ketchup. 
But this associative factor is equally open to scientific 
experiment. 

Yet, after all, the make-up of the article and its paper 
cover are less important than the quality and construction 
of the goods themselves. The manufacturer too easily 
forgets that his product is to be used for the purposes of 
human minds, and that a real perfection of his output 
can never be reached unless the subtlest adjustment to the 



i6o AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

mental functions Is secured. This Is true for the most 
trivial as well as the most refined and complex thing that 
IS to satisfy human Interests. To be sure, small effect 
would be gained If the seller were simply to look over a 
text-book of psychology. He might easily be misled. 
The psychologist can show that a square filled with 
horizontal lines looks tall and one filled with vertical 
lines looks broad, but woe to the tailoring establishment 
that should dress its customers In accordance with 
that psychological prescription. If the tailor were to 
dress the stout woman who wants to appear tall In cos- 
tumes with horizontal stripes and the thin one who wants 
to look plump In a dress with vertical stripes, the effect 
would be the opposite of that which was desired. It Is 
not that psychology Is wrong, but the application of the 
principle Is out of order. We never look at a woman 
as we look at a square, comparing the height with the 
breadth. The vertical stripes In the gown force our 
eyeballs to move upward and downward and reenforce by 
that our perception of height, while the horizontal stripes 
simply suggest to us the idea of breadth. Or, to point 
to a similar misapplication: There was a painter who 
had learned from the psychologists that we see singly only 
those things upon which we focus, while everything In the 
background is seen by the two eyes In a double Image. 
He thought for this reason that he would reach a more 
natural effect If he drew double lines for the background 
things In his pictures. The effect was absurd, as his 
double picture was now seen with each of the two eyes, 



THE MARKET AND PSYCHOLOGY i6i 

while in reality we get a double image by developing one 
in each eye. 

Half-baked psychology certainly cannot help us, but 
the fact that misunderstandings may come up in every 
corner of psychology is no argument against its proper 
use. We should not like to eat the meal which a cook 
might prepare from bits of chemical knowledge gathered 
from a hand-book of physiology. The well-trained ex- 
pert must always remain the middleman between science 
and the needs of practical life. But if special laboratories 
for applied psychology could examine the market demands 
with careful study of all the principles involved, the gain 
for practical life would be certain. 

To analyze the case a little more fully, I may point to 
a product of our factories that is indispensable to our 
modern life — the typewriting machine. It may serve 
as an illustration just as well as a hundred other industrial 
articles, and it has the advantage that the varieties of 
the machines are popularly well known. Everybody 
knows that there are machines with or without visible 
writing, machines with ideal keyboards and machines with 
universal keyboards, machines with the double keyboard 
and machines with the single keyboard on which the 
capital letters demand the pressure of a shift-key to 
change the position of the carriage. Psychologists nowa- 
days especially in Germany, have started to examine care- 
fully the claims of the various systems, and the results 
differ greatly from what the man on the street presupposes. 
Thus we stand before a curious conflict. The manu- 



i62 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

facturer must shape his article in such a way that it 
attracts the customer, but while this holds without restric- 
tion for questions of external shape and outfit and pack- 
ing and name, it may interfere with the greatest usefulness 
of the article and therefore with the real advantage of 
the buyer. Yet ultimately the advantage of the men who 
use the article must be the strongest advertisement, and It 
may thus be quite possible that it lies more in the interest 
of the manufacturer to bring to the market a product that 
pleases less at the first approach and by a surface appear- 
ance, but more in the long run. 

The visible writing of the typewriter is a case in point. 
He who is not accustomed to typewriting and wants to 
begin it will naturally prefer the writing with visible 
letters. He thinks of his ordinary handwriting ; he knows 
how essential it is for him to follow the point of his pen 
with his eyes. He forgets that In the visible writing the 
very letter that he Is writing is, of course, Invisible at 
that moment, and the touch of the key perfectly produces 
the complete letter. The real effect is, therefore, that 
he sees the letters that he is no longer writing. The case 
is thus fundamentally different from that of handwriting. 
On the other hand, the amount of attention that is given 
to looking at the visible words Is withdrawn from the 
only field that Is essential — the keyboard or the copy. 
The visible machine may appear more attractive to one 
who does not know, but may be less effective through 
starting bad and distracting habits. Yet again this may 
have psychological exceptions. In the case of those in- 



THE MARKET AND PSYCHOLOGY 163 

divlduals who are absolutely visualizers, the visible writ- 
ing may be a help when they are writing, not from a 
copy, but on dictation or from their own thoughts. In 
that case the seeing of the preceding letters would help 
in the organization of the motor impulses needed for 
pressing the keys for the next syllable. It would, there- 
fore, demand a careful experimental analysis to determine 
those persons who would profit and those who would 
suffer by the visibility of the writing. The Instinctive 
feeling can never decide It. 

But this difference of individual disposition plays no less 
a part with reference to the other qualities of the various 
types of machines. The double keyboard demands a 
distribution of attention over a very large field. The psy- 
chological laboratory can easily demonstrate that In- 
dividuals exist whose attention is concentrated and can- 
not stretch out much beyond the focus, and others whose 
attention is wide and moves easily. On the other hand, 
the shift-key Is not merely one of the many keys, but de- 
mands an entirely different kind of effort, which interrupts 
the smooth running flow of finger movements. The psy- 
chophysical experiment demonstrates how much more 
slowly and with how much more effort the shift-key move- 
ment must be performed. Again, the analysis of the 
laboratory shows that there are Individuals who can easily 
Interrupt their regular movement habits by will impulses 
of an entirely different kind, but others who lose much 
of their psychological energy by so sudden a change. 
For these the breaking In of the shift-key process means 



i64 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

an upsetting of the mental adjustment and therefore a 
great loss in their effectiveness. Accordingly, the 
machine that is excellent for the one is undesirable for the 
other, and the market would fare better if all this were 
not left to chance. 

Even as to the keyboard, it seems that psychological 
principles are involved which demand reference to in- 
dividual tendencies. For some it is best if the letters that 
frequently occur together in the language are in near 
neighborhood on the keyboard; for other minds such an 
arrangement is the least desirable. These writers mix 
up the motor impulses that belong to similar and cor- 
related ideas, and they fare better if the intimately as- 
sociated letters demand a movement in an entirely 
different direction, with the greatest possible psychological 
contrast. 

There is hardly any instrument on the market for which 
a similar analysis of the interplay of mental energies 
could not be carried out. But let us rather turn to an- 
other aspect, the work in the factory itself. I feel sure 
that the time will come when the expert psychologist 
will become the most helpful agent in this sphere of 
industrial life. The farmers have tilled the ground for 
thousands of years without scientific chemistry, but we 
know how indispensable the aid of the chemist appears 
to the agriculturist to-day. A new period of farming has 
begun through the help of the scientific expert. A similar 
service to labor and industry might be rendered by ex- 
perimental psychology. It would even be quite con- 



THE MARKET AND PSYCHOLOGY 165 

ceivable that governments should organize this help in 
a similar way to that by which they have secured agri- 
cultural laboratories for the farms of the country. The 
Department of Agriculture at Washington has experi- 
mental stations all over the land, and not a little of the 
great harvest is due to their effectiveness. The Depart- 
ment of Commerce and Labor at a future time may 
establish experimental stations which will bring corres- 
ponding help to the mills and factories and even to the 
artisans everywhere. There Is no establishment that pro- 
duces without making use of human minds and brains. 
The mill-owner must learn how to use the mental energies 
of his laborers in the same way that the farmer knows 
how to use the properties of the soil. And such help 
Is not only to the economic Interest of the producer; it 
would be perhaps still more to the Interest of the work- 
Ingman and his market price. 

The first thought might turn to the safety of the 
laborer, which Is Indeed dependent upon various psy- 
chological conditions. For instance, the mill-owner is 
not expected to know what mental factors determine the 
correct perception of distance, and yet It Is evident that 
a laborer Is In constant danger if he cannot estimate cor- 
rectly his distance from a moving machine. He may be 
able to see correctly with one eye every part of the 
machine, but If the other eye Is somewhat defective, 
though he himself may not notice It, his plastic Interpreta- 
tion of his Impressions will be InsufEcIent. He will con- 
stantly be In danger of putting his hands Into the buzz- 



1 66 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

Ing wheels. Only careful consideration of such psy- 
chological elements as build up the idea of distance, and 
exact tests of the workingman's senses, could eliminate 
such ever-present dangers. 

The captain of industry may feel more interested in 
bringing out the fullest efficiency of his laborer; but, 
again, as yet nothing indicates that he is willing to put 
scientific exactitude into the service of this dominant psy- 
chological question. An experimental test alone can de- 
cide under what conditions the greatest continuity of 
effective work can be secured and under what mental con- 
ditions the individual can do his best. Methods for 
studying the curve of fatigue in the individual laborer, 
or the conditions for his most accurate muscle work, and 
a hundred similar devices, are to-day already at the dis- 
posal of the mental workshop; but probably for a long 
time to come the foreman will be thought to know better 
than the expert. 

Moreover, it is evident that as soon as this contact 
between the mill and the experimental psychological 
laboratory has been perfected, new questions will arise 
corresponding to the special needs of industrial activity. 
The technical conditions of every industry in the country 
can easily be imitated in the laboratory with the simplest 
means. So far we have not the least really scientific 
investigation of the psychological effect of specializing, of 
the division of labor, of the influence of changes in the 
machines, of the complexity of machines, of the effect of 
temperature, food, light, color, noise, odor, of discipline, 



THE MARKET AND PSYCHOLOGY 167 

reward, Imitation, piece work, of repetition, of distribution 
of attention, of emotion, and hundreds of other mental 
factors that enter Into the worklngman's life. It Is simply 
untrue to say that those things regulate themselves. On 
the contrary, traditions and superficial tendencies, short- 
sighted economy and Indifference, a thousand times estab- 
lish methods that are to nobody's Interest. The employer 
and the employee alike have to suffer from them. 

We may get an Idea of the help that could be brought 
If, for Instance, we think of the methods of learning the 
handling of machines. There are many industrial activi- 
ties that demand most complicated technique, and yet the 
learning is left to most haphazard methods. So far, we 
know practically nothing as to the most profitable methods 
of learning these industrial activities. But we have only 
to compare this situation with the excellent work that 
modern experimental psychology has performed in the 
fields of handwriting, typewriting, telegraphy, piano-play- 
ing, and drawing. In every one of these fields most care- 
ful experiments have been carried on for months under 
the most subtle conditions. With complex instruments 
the growth and development of the process were analyzed, 
and the influences that retarded progress and hampered 
the most efl[iclent learning were disentangled. 

Again we may learn from the case of typewriting work. 
Any one who writes with the forefingers may finally reach 
a certain rapidity In handling the machine. Yet no one 
masters It who has not learned It In a systematic way 
which must ultimately be controlled by the studies of ex- 



1 68 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

perlmental psychologists. Such experimental analyses of 
the processes in learning to run the typewriter have been 
carried through with the greatest carefulness, and have 
demonstrated that the student passes through a number 
of different stages. He Is not only doing the thing more 
and more quickly : the essential factor lies In the develop- 
ment of habits — habits of manipulation, habits of feel- 
ing attitude, habits of attention, habits of association, 
habits of decisions In overcoming difficulties; and every 
insight Into this formation of mental connections offers 
guidance for a proficient training. The experiments in- 
dicate the psychological conditions for a spurt in effort, 
for fluctuations In efficiency, for the lasting gain In speed 
and accuracy, for their relations to the activity of the 
heart and to motor activities. In short, we now know 
scientifically the psychological processes by which the 
greatest possible economy in typewriting can be secured. 
There Is no industrial machine In our factories and mills 
for which a similar study has been performed; and yet 
every effort in this direction would Increase the effective- 
ness of the laborer and the profit of the employer. 

Our psychological educators nowadays have studied with 
all the methods of the laboratory the effects of pauses 
during the school day. We know how certain pauses 
work as real recreation In which exhausted energies are 
restituted, but that other kinds of pauses work as disturb- 
ing interruptions by which the acquired adjustment to the 
work Is lost. It would need most accurate investigations 
with the subtlest means of the psychological workshop to 



THE MARKET AND PSYCHOLOGY 169 

determine for each special industry what rhythm of work 
and what recesses, what rapidity and what method of 
recreation, would secure the fullest effect. The mere 
subjective feehng of the workingman himself or the 
common-sense judgment of the onlooker may be entirely 
misleading. 

Does not every one know how this inner sensation of 
strength has deceived the workingman in the case of al- 
cohol? His bottle supplies him with an illusory feeling 
of energy; the careful experiment demonstrates that his 
effectiveness suffers under the immediate influence of 
whiskey. The scientific inquiry in every such case must 
replace the superficial impression. Moreover, a sys- 
tematic study would not only inquire how the laborer is 
to learn the most efficient use of the existing machines, 
but the machines themselves would then be adjusted to 
the results of the psychological experiment. The ex- 
periment would have to determine which muscles could 
produce the effect that Is demanded with the greatest 
accuracy and speed and perseverance, and the handles and 
levers and keys would have to be distributed accordingly. 
Even the builder of the motor-car relies on most super- 
ficial, common-sense judgment when he arranges the levers 
as they seem most practical for quick handling. The psy- 
chological laboratory, which would study in thousandths 
of a second the movements of the chauffeur with the vari- 
ous cars, might find that here also illusions too easily 
enter. Industry ought to have outgrown the stage of un- 
scientific decisions, and It Is Inexcusable if physics and 



I70 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

chemistry are considered the only sciences that come into 
question, and experimental psychology Is Ignored, when 
every single business, every wheel to be turned and every 
lever to be moved, are dependent upon the psychical facts 
of attention and memory, of will and feeling, of percep- 
tion and judgment. 

It would probably be more difficult to help the actual 
sale of the commercial products by exact scientific methods, 
except as far as advertisements and display are concerned. 
And yet it Is evident that every man behind the counter 
and every sales-girl who wants to Influence the customer 
works with psychological agencies. The study of the psy- 
chology of attention and suggestion, of association of Ideas 
and of emotion, may systematically assist the commercial 
transaction. The process certainly has two sides, but if 
we think of the Interest of the salesman only,. we might 
say that he has to hypnotize his victim. He has to play 
skilfully on the attention of his shopping customer, he 
must slowly inhibit in her mind the desire for anything 
that the store cannot offer, he must cleverly fix the emotions 
on a particular choice, and finally he must Implant the 
conviction that life Is not worth living without this par- 
ticular shirt-waist. How much the stores would profit 
if every employee should learn the careful avoidance of 
opposing suggestions ! Whether shop-girls in a depart- 
ment store are advised to ask after every sale : " Do you 
want to take it with you? " or are Instructed to ask first: 
" Do you want to have it sent to your home? " makes no 
difference to the feeling of the customers. They are un- 



THE MARKET AND PSYCHOLOGY 171 

conscious sufferers from the suggestion, but for the store 
it may mean a difference of thousands for the delivery 
service. The newspaper boy at the subway entrance who 
simply asks: ^' Paper, sir? " cannot hope for the success 
of his rival who with forceful suggestion asks : " Which 
paper?" 

The experimental study of the commercial question may 
finally bring new clearness Into the relations of trade and 
law. To give one illustration from many, I may mention 
the case of commercial imitation. Every one who studies 
the court cases in restraint of trade becomes Impressed 
with the looseness and vagueness of the legal ideas in- 
volved. There seems nowhere a definite standard. In 
buying his favorite article the purchaser is sometimes ex- 
pected to exert the sharpest attention In order not to be 
deceived by an Imitation. In other cases, the court seems 
to consider the purchaser as the most careless, stupid per- 
son, who can be tricked by any superficial similarity. The 
evidence of the trade witnesses is an entirely unreliable, 
arbitrary factor. The so-called ordinary purchaser 
changes his mental qualities with every judge, and it seems 
impossible to foresee whether a certain label will be con- 
strued as an unallowed imitation of the other or as a 
similar but independent trademark. 

In the interest of psychology applied to commerce and 
labor, I have collected in my laboratory a large number of 
specimens which show all possible degrees of Imitation. 
In every case it is evident that the similarity of form or 
color or name or packing is used in a conscious way in 



172 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

order to profit from the reputation of another article 
which has won its popularity by quality or by advertise- 
ment. I have a bottle of Moxle among a dozen imita- 
tions of similar names in bottles of a similar shape and 
with the beverage similar in color to the successfully ad- 
vertised Moxle. Tomato ketchups and sardine boxes, 
cigarette cases and talcum powders, spearmint gums and 
plug tobaccos, glove labels and vaudeville posters, patent 
medicines and gelatines, appear in interesting twin and 
triplet forms. The cigarette boxes of Egyptian Deities 
are accompanied by the Egyptian Prettiest and the Egyp- 
tian Daintiest; Rupena stands at the side of Peruna; and 
the Pain Expeller is packed and bottled like the Pain 
Killer. 

Not a few of the specimens of my imitation museum 
have kept the lawyers busy. Yet all this is evidently at 
first a case for the psychologist. The whole problem be- 
longs to the psychology of recognition. There would be 
no difficulty in producing In the laboratory conditions 
under which the mental principles Involved could be re- 
peated and brought under exact observation. Many ob- 
stacles would have to be overcome, but certainly the 
experiment could determine the degree of difficulty or ease 
with which the recognition of a certain Impression can be 
secured. As soon as such a scale of the degrees of atten- 
tion were gained, we could have an objective standard 
and could determine whether or not too much attention 
was needed to distinguish an Imitation from the original. 
Then we might find by objective methods whether the 



THE MARKET AND PSYCHOLOGY 173 

village drug-store or our lack of attention was to blame 
when we were anxious for a glass of Moxie and the clerk 
gave us Instead the brown bitter fluid from a bottle of 
Noxie, Hoxie, Non-Tox, Modox, Nox-All, Noxemall, 
Noxie-Cola, Moxine, or Sod-Ox, all of which stand tempt- 
ingly in my little museum for applied pschology. 



VIII 
BOOKS AND BOOKSTORES 



VIII 

BOOKS AND BOOKSTORES 

T HAVE just come home from a delightful trip on the 
European Continent, In which there was never any 
chance to be homesick for America. America was visible 
everywhere! American acquaintances at every inn, and 
at every turn of the road, American goods strewn over 
every land. From the Ohio cash-register and the Con- 
necticut typewriter and the California fruit and the 
Massachusetts shoe and the New York chorus-girl, down 
to the little devices with the United States stamp, every 
American product seems to welcome the traveler on the 
other side. There is only one thing he had better pack 
into his trunk beforehand if he wants ever to see it: an 
American book. 

The American book Is practically unknown in the 
European Continent. I went to the special bookstores of 
foreign literature ; they had a hundred excuses In store, but 
never the books I wanted. I made my pilgrimage to the 
large libraries, and could not find such American books as 
no village library in America would wish to be without. 
I went to scholarly congresses and talked there with hard- 
reading men of all nations, and they spoke of the writings 
of American scholars as of the Rocky Mountains, which 

177 



178 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

they certainly accept as existing, and which may be splen- 
did and wonderful, but which they have never had a 
chance to see in the original. And on expressing my 
astonishment, I usually received the reply that it is too 
bothersome to get American books, as the book-trade of 
the United States seems without order and system : nobody 
knows where to find what Is wanted. I saw it with my 
own eyes. An Important book by a Columbia professor 
had appeared In New York In March; In the following 
August, a German bookstore wrote to the English repre- 
sentative of the American house, and ordered the book 
for a customer. I saw the reply card which laconically 
announced from London that the book had not yet ap- 
peared in print. I was In Berlin when a little paper of 
mine in a popular New York magazine stirred up some 
discussion in America; the discussion went over Into the 
German papers, but the magazine did not follow over the 
ocean. After hunting for it in vain In the bookstores, 
where the English magazines were heaped up, I was al- 
most surprised to discover at last a forlorn copy on a 
hotel news-stand, purchasable for about three times the 
regular price. 

It is easy to make light of this failure of the American 
book abroad : what does it amount to, — we are asked, — 
if our latest novel Is sold at home In hundreds of thou- 
sands, and if our magazines reach every village of 
America? But even if the dollars and cents in the case 
may be a trifling matter, there is a more important issue 
involved. The world-influence of the American mind 



BOOKS AND BOOKSTORES 179 

must suffer if the chief messengers of American thought, 
the books, are hampered on their way, and if the Ameri- 
can scholar and poet and essayist and author cannot be 
heard in every land. The mist of prejudices against the 
crudeness and materialism of the New World is still 
thick and heavy; how can it be dispelled, if those who 
interpret American ideals and express American endeavors 
are kept in silence outside of the home boundaries? In 
our times, when the civilized world has become one, and 
every newspaper of Europe has its long cables about the 
most trivial American events, it is a wrong to the world- 
influence of American culture if our writers are banished 
from the European Continent by our own carelessness. 

Of course, it would seem that good translations might 
overcome the evil. But what a pitiful tale is made by the 
haphazard selections of the translators! It often seems 
as if the French, the German, the Italian translators 
had carefully chosen the least important and least sig- 
nificant products for their interpretative efforts. In 
German, for Instance, It Is true that Mark Twain and 
Bret Harte, and Poe, and, to some extent Emerson, are 
well known by translations, but beyond that all Is chaos; 
and among American writers of the last years, Andrew 
Carnegie and Helen Kellar appear most often in the 
window of the German bookshop. The great tendencies 
of modern American writing do not show at all In the 
chance translations of the day. 

And yet the gloomy view of our American book-trade 
which I brought back from my European travels has, after 



i8o AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

all, a much more serious meaning. The failure abroad 
may not count for much, but the Impressions in Europe 
brought it more clearly to my mind than before that the 
American book to a high degree is no less a failure in 
our own country; here, too, it does not really reach the 
readers. Of course, the American buys many books, and 
pushes the latest novel to its third hundred thousand, but 
no one who watches the selection closely can doubt that 
haphazard methods determine the demand and supply, 
and that superficiality and aimlessness prevail; and the 
guilt for all of It lies in the disorganization of the book- 
trade. A change somewhat after the European example 
Is needed, and such a change would be not simply a com- 
mercial problem, but truly a social reform. That is the 
reason, and the only reason, why an observer of Ameri- 
can social traits asks for a hearing; a serious Injury to 
the people's mind Is Imminent — that It Is an Injury also 
to the publishers' pocket is secondary. 

The well-adapted book at home Is, after all, the 
strongest agency for national culture. It Is the only re- 
liable remedy for the saloon and Its miseries, and it Is 
the only antidote to the benumbing chase for mere wealth 
and its pseudo pleasures and excitements. The news- 
paper with Its sensationalism cannot stem the longings 
of the mind, and the chances are great that those who are 
not In the habit of reading good books will benefit httle 
even from the rich treasures that the magazines put be- 
fore them. They glance perhaps at the pictures, they 
rush through a story, they peep into an article, — they 



BOOKS AND BOOKSTORES i8i 

have lost the repose needed for that reading which the 
hbrary at home suggests and sternly demands. Of 
course, we are near the truth in blaming for all this the 
hurry of our up-to-date life. To rush through the world 
in automobiles means to accustom the eye to the rapid 
flight of impressions, and spoils the inner eye for the 
fancies of repose. The woman who wastes her time with 
bridge whist loses the energy for the old-fashioned habit 
of continual serious reading. But, however true that may 
be, is not perhaps the other side equally responsible? 
Is the book defeated only because the rush of superficial 
life has become so wild, or has not perhaps the rush 
become so passionate, and the automobile and the whist 
so absorbing, because the book was too weak, and did 
not force itself sufficiently into the foreground? J 

I point at once to the core of the trouble: in Europe 
the bookstores are the center of the reading community, 
and their number increases steadily, — America's book- 
stores are dying out, and their influence is insignificant; 
outside of the largest cities you seek them almost in vain. 
If I go in Germany, for instance, to a town of a hundred 
thousand inhabitants, I find from a dozen to a score of 
attractive well-supplied bookstores. A rich assortment of 
books from all fields — new and older books, literary 
and scholarly books, popular editions and costly works — 
is easily accessible to the customer, and by the splendid 
organization of the trade, every book that is not at hand 
can be supplied from the central reservoirs in a day. 
Each store has its ample display in the windows, constantly 



i82 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

changing; each one gladly sends to Its customers for in- 
spection all the new books which might have special 
Interest for him. The books there come to you and at- 
tract you and tempt you and take hold on you. 

The average American town of a hundred thousand 
inhabitants may have a dozen jewelry stores, but not a 
single true bookstore. Of course there are plenty of 
chances to buy the stories of the month, and some books 
on birds and on travel, a golden treasury and a book for 
the boy; but a full supply in all lines, as it is found next 
door In the grocery or the cigar or the glove or the ribbon 
store, is practically unknown outside of the largest cities. 
The books are sold either In the small stationer's, with 
ink and leather goods, if not with candy, or in the huge 
department store, between bathing-suits and trunks. In 
the one case, there is no backing of capital; all is done with 
the narrowest means. In the other case, there is no profit, 
as the books are on the whole added to attract the people 
who might happen to buy an umbrella and shirt-waist 
after being drawn Into the big place where the latest 
novel Is given away below the publishers' wholesale price. 
In both cases there is nothing at hand which has not the 
probability of pretty immediate sale, and in both cases 
all real interest in literature is absent; an adjustment to 
the subtler needs of the community is thus impossible. 

You might reply: That does not matter, as we 
Americans order our books directly from the publisher, 
which saves us the profit of the middleman; the book 
can be sold so much cheaper because there is no local 



BOOKS AND BOOKSTORES 183 

trade which adds the profit of the dealer to the price. 
What the publishers have to offer we know sufficiently 
from their advertisements in the papers, and from their 
pretty, attractive catalogues, and from the reviews and 
critical articles. And finally, there are the subscription 
agents, who certainly lack no patience in bringing their 
books to the prospective readers. We have therefore 
stationery shops, and department houses, and publishers' 
advertisements and selling agents, and in addition the rail- 
road counters and the hotel-stands, — what more can be 
desired ? 

All this is granted. But what is the result? Buying 
books has become to a high degree a matter of passing 
fashions, and these fashions are essentially determined 
by the advertisements of the publishers. Everybody 
buys the latest book which the fashion pushes forward, 
and the chances are great that it is just that kind of a 
book which Rve years later nobody will read, and which 
will be a dead weight in the home library. No publisher 
can afford to give equal chance to all his publications. 
To bring a book, only for a few weeks, to the attention 
of the magazine or newspaper readers is extremely ex- 
pensive; it is possible only for the books which, by the 
name of the author or by sensational features or by special 
timeliness, promise unusual sale. Any other book, too, 
might be brought forward by extensive advertising, but 
it would be ruinous; it may not be difficult to sell a one- 
dollar book if a two-dollar bill is laid in every copy, but 
the publishers do not like that method. As a result, most 



1 84 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

authors complain that their publishers do not take enough 
trouble with the announcement of their particular writings, 
and that they therefore sell In unsatisfactory numbers. 
They may well envy the German author whose books are 
supplied on request to every bookstore in the country 
free of charge for a year's display. With us here a 
book that Is not widely advertised, or widely criticised, 
does not indicate Its existence to the average reader. 
And yet this advertising system itself makes the idea 
of reducing the price of books by eliminating the book- 
store entirely hopeless ; it Is more expensive than the profit 
of the middleman, and serves only the few favorites. 

The Immediate consequence of this whole situation is 
the rapid disappearance of the books after their noisy 
appearance for a few months. Debutantes In our society 
are allowed to dance at least more than one winter be- 
fore they withdraw; but In the catalogues which pile up 
on our breakfast-tables the debutante books of the season 
are alone admitted, the output of the foregoing year is 
forgotten. A book which does not win favor In the first 
weeks seldom has a second chance. But that Is a waste 
of intellectual labor which no nation can afford. Eu- 
ropeans are often surprised to find how wasteful the 
American household of moderate means is: the kitchen 
makes use only of the best slices, and does not understand 
the art of making the less favored parts appetizing by 
dainty cooking, and thus serviceable to the household 
welfare. The literary kitchen of the nation is much more 
wasteful, without being rich enough to be able to afford 



BOOKS AND BOOKSTORES 185 

such luxury. To live ever from new books means in this 
case simply underfeeding. 

This hasty rhythm is all the more ruinous because 
America does not believe in new editions, — one of the 
saddest features of American bookmaking. In Germany, 
for instance, a book outside of fiction is usually revised by 
the author when one thousand copies have been sold. It 
is thus kept living, in steady contact with the progress of 
knowledge, and in steady adjustment to criticism; thor- 
oughness demands it. In the United States I know 
students' text-books sold up to more than fifty thousand 
copies in the last twenty years with never a word in them 
changed. If the book has once found favor, it goes on,' 
by mere tradition, unchanged, however antiquated its 
statements may be. The European publisher in such 
cases would have demanded from the authors a revision 
at least every second year. The reason for the differ- 
ence is clear. The European book is printed from type 
for the purpose of making new editions easy, as the type 
is destroyed after the printing of a limited number. The 
American book, on the other hand, is printed from plates, 
which allow an unlimited reprinting if the book is suc- 
cessful. It the plates are once made, it is of course much 
cheaper to go on with unchanged reprinting than to set 
up a really new edition. The publisher too often tempts 
the author into such superficial usage by contracts which 
allow increasing royalty with the growing sale, and in this 
way the financial advantage of both author and publisher 
has made the custom of new editions unusual. Yet the 



1 86 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

best chance to bring an old book to new light is in this 
way thrown away; in Europe each new edition is cir- 
culated and reviewed like a new book. In short, very 
different factors work together to make American books 
melt away with the " snows of yesteryear." 

The well-advertised books disappear too quickly, and 
the books which do not justify extensive advertisement 
have no chance, — but all this Is the poor fate of books 
which have had at least the good fortune to appear. 
Can there be any doubt that this whole situation works 
from the outset against the appearance of many other 
books? Not every book has the desire to be a best seller, 
not every book Is written for large crowds, and yet If It 
had a chance to reach the Inquiring booklovers In every 
home, and to remain for their perusal In the bookstores, 
It might slowly find a little audience, and might thus In 
the long run pay the publisher. But the American pub- 
lisher knows that there Is no long run for the book which 
is not expensively advertised, or which does not appeal 
to large circles. He cannot risk, therefore, manufactur- 
ing the plates, and the elaborate manuscript remains un- 
printed. The lack of good bookstores, which are just 
adapted for selling the slow-moving books, thus Inhibits 
the literary production of the whole country. The young 
or unknown author is pushed into the newspapers and 
magazines, while his thoughts perhaps demand the book 
for adequate expression; or he Is forced to keep his 
product unpublished if his work is unsulted to the pop- 
ular channels. 



BOOKS AND BOOKSTORES 187 

Scholarship and academic activity suffer immensely 
from this unwillingness of the publishers to risk the pub- 
lication of a modest book; and they are justified In their 
fears, as, under the American system, publication would 
indeed mean a loss to them. I feel sure that my first four 
German books on topics of experimental psychology 
would not have been published by an American publisher, 
or only at my own expense. In the last year there ap- 
peared In Germany, with Its sixty million Inhabitants, 
28,703 now books; in the United States, with Its eighty 
millions, not more than 81 12. In magazines, America 
is far ahead of Europe; their organization is splendid, 
they know how to reach the American reader ; as they do 
not need the bookstore, but live from subscriptions and 
news-stands, the publishers can count on success, and thus 
no plan need remain unrealized. With books, exactly 
the opposite; the channels of distribution are clogged 
because for them the bookstores are indispensable, and 
their meagerness thus works backwards on the timidity 
of the publishers. 

At the same time the bookbuyers become disorganized 
too. They no longer have that delightful opportunity to 
spend half an hour once or twice a week in a well-sup- 
plied bookstore, and to enjoy the old friends and the new 
acquaintances before they are brought home for the fam- 
ily hearth. The reader without a bookstore becomes 
uncritical ; with him to work upon, the silliest book can be 
brought up to a large edition by clever advertisements, 
and a smart subscription agent can lead him Into any 



1 88 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

trap. The St. Louis World's Fair published an excellent 
work in eight volumes as a report of its international 
scientific congress. This scholarly production was sold 
at first for twenty, later for twelve dollars, and 
when the interest seemed exhausted, the remaining two 
thousand copies were given on a small bid to a little 
publishing firm which was expected to sell the rest for a 
still smaller price. But the firm knew where our trade- 
methods have landed us. They took a cheap book of 
pictures, and distributed the photographs carelessly 
through the eight volumes; for instance, they had a pic- 
ture of a naked woman with a crescent in her hair,^ 
they gave it as an illustration to a scholarly report to the 
Congress about the moon ; and so on. Finally they made 
a showy binding, and then they sold each set by sub- 
scription for one hundred and fifty dollars. 

What can be done to bring the haphazard and 
hysterical methods of bookbuying to desirable conditions, 
from which publishers, authors, and readers may profit 
alike? Nothing more ought to be necessary than a 
fundamental reform of the bookstores. We must have 
in every town large, beautiful, well-supplied bookstores, 
conducted with some literary instinct. The German 
method of bringing this about is not applicable in the 
United States, as here it would be construed as unallow- 
able restraint of trade. The German law allows restric- 
tion which American suspicion of monopolies would not 
tolerate. 

In Germany all publishers form one association, no 



BOOKS AND BOOKSTORES 189 

member of which has a right to sell directly to the 
customer; every copy, therefore, goes through the book- 
seller. Yet that alone, if adopted here, would not secure 
any great advantage, for it would be very doubtful 
whether a small town could have its decent bookstore, as 
the large stores in the big cities would evidently be able 
to give a high discount, and would thus secure the whole 
trade by mail-orders. The bookshop in the small place 
would then be lost. The really decisive point is, there- 
fore, that no member of the German publishers' associa- 
tion has a right to give books to a bookstore that sells 
below the regular retail price. The customer In a little 
country town in Germany can thus get his book from 
Berlin or Leipzig only at the same price at which the 
store in the neighboring street supplies it, and his neigh- 
bor can give him the further advantage of a convenient 
display. He trades, therefore, in his own town; and in 
this way even the smallest place can provide business for a 
solid bookstore which is a center of literary interest. 

Such an agreement, which stimulates the book-loving 
Instinct through every county of the Fatherland, involves 
Indeed a restraint of trade, and the Supreme Court of 
the United States has decided against It. The bookstore 
which breaks the price agreement with one publisher, 
and undersells Its neighbor, cannot by any associative 
agreement lose the right to get books from other pub- 
lishers; yet just on that hinges the German success. But 
there are other ways to secure similar results, and one 
especially which would be the true American way: a com- 



190 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

bination without monopoly. In every field of American 
activity the combinations have raised the level of demand 
and supply; it is high time that we get for the book- 
trade that improvement which even the tobacco interests 
have introduced for the sale of their goods. The dusty 
little cigar-shops of the past are crowded out by the large 
stores in which the united tobacco companies sell their 
goods under their own auspices. 

It is by all means the best way. In the department 
stores literature will never take a dignified place, and the 
little bookstores, or rather half-bookstores and quarter- 
bookstores, which prevail to-day cannot ever be the germs 
for the desired development, because there is no capital 
behind them. Bookstores which are really to serve the 
ideal interests of American culture must be attractive, 
large halls with a rich assortment, and a display with 
comfort for the reader, and that means an outlay of 
large capital, — which, indeed, will earn more than in 
the dingy shops of to-day. Places like the six or eight 
best and finest bookstores in New York, Boston, Philadel- 
phia and Chicago ought to be several hundred in number, 
spread over the whole land. Their function would be not 
less important than that of the public library. And all 
this is possible at once if the publishers themselves would 
unite their energies, and together create bookstores in 
which all products of their publishing houses should be 
on continuous display. They have the capital, and they 
would find this method ultimately cheaper than their 
present catalogue system; it would swell the home 



BOOKS AND BOOKSTORES 191 

libraries ; it would bring the quiet and modest books to a 
dignified sale ; it would keep the good books alive longer, 
and would adjust the sale to the really serious needs of 
the public: a change which would bring a strengthening 
of every sound impulse in the community. 

Something of this kind must be done, or the book- 
stores will and must dwindle away entirely, and with them 
the habit of reading a good personally owned book by 
the home fireplace, — the habit of reading with continued 
attention, instead of rushing spasmodically through the 
little cut-off pieces of the illustrated pamphlets. Other- 
wise, instead of leisurely wandering through the fields of 
literature, there will soon be only hasty automobiling 
through them, with a steady increase of superficiality; 
and, worst of all, the authors will be more and more 
forced to adapt themselves to such conditions. Ameri- 
can literature will become more and more hasty and oc- 
casional, while we are all longing for that great, new, 
upward movement of American literature for which the 
time seems ripe and the gods seem willing. 



IX 
THE WORLD LANGUAGE 



IX 

THE WORLD LANGUAGE 

^ I ''HE Simplified Spelling Board has every reason to 
spell Success with a capital. Theodore Roosevelt 
marches in front of the army, brilliant scholars carry 
the colors, eminent authors beat the drum, great diction- 
ary-makers belong to the general staff, and Andrew Car- 
negie looks after the pay-roll; a triumphant progress is 
thus certain. And even though a word of comment may 
yet seem proper for one or another who hates to learn 
anew, certainly the foreigner, at least, ought to keep 
silent; and one who, like me, spoke the first English 
sentence of his life only after having been made a pro- 
fessor in Harvard University, should be the last to ven- 
ture an opinion. 

Yet the Simplified Spelling Board says solemnly: 
" The Board expects and welcomes criticism ; it asks only 
that the criticisms shall be made after and not before 
the critic has read the pubhcations of the Board." And 
if in critical mood you turn to the Board's publications, 
you find very soon that the foreigner is not by any means 
so negligible a quantity in the matter of spelling. Take 
the first Circular which the Board has published; you need 
not read more than the first paragraph, to perceive that 

195 



196 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

after all we " strangers beyond the seas " are very near 
to the heart of every simplified speller. The opening of 
the first proud proclamation reads as follows: "All 
whose mother-tongue Is English believe that, if it is not 
unfairly handicapped, it will become the dominant and 
International language of the world. For this destiny 
it is fitted by Its use as the medium of the widest com- 
merce and the most progressive civilization, by its 
cosmopolitan vocabulary, and by Its grammatical sim- 
plicity. No other existing speech, and none of the pro- 
posed artificial international languages has the same 
adaptability to such a use. There Is, however, a wide- 
spread and well-grounded conviction that In Its progress 
toward this goal our language Is handicapped by one 
thing, and only one — its intricate and disordered spelling 
which makes it a puzzle to the stranger within our gates 
and a mystery to the stranger beyond the seas. English 
is easy, adaptable, and capable of many-sided develop- 
ment: Its spelling is difficult and cumbersome." 

Does not such an introduction of the Board's work 
give to every well-meaning foreigner the right to look 
into the matter with his own eyes? As regards that 
question which the Board first raises i. e., simplifying 
the task of the foreign student of English, no one in the 
long honorary list, from Chancellor Andrews to President 
Woodward, seems to be such a trustworthy authority as 
any little school-boy in France or Germany or Italy. Is 
it true that difficulties which the foreigner encounters in 
acquiring his English are those which our simpllfiers are. 



THE WORLD LANGUAGE 197 

going to remove ? This pretension, at least, I venture to 
deny with full conviction. Professor Brander Matthews 
and his followers gave out at first three hundred words 
which are to be improved. Send them over to the boys 
and girls " beyond the seas " who are grinding at their 
English grammar to-day, and tell them that the happy 
day has come when their despair shall be ended. But 
they will shake their heads. They will feel as if you 
had told them that their history learning was too heavy 
a burden, and that therefore, in future, the teacher would 
omit the little anecdotes from the lives of the heroes. 
No, for them the spell which needs dispelling Is not mis- 
spelling. 

The fundamental difficulty of English for us foreigners 
is, of course, the pronunciation ; then comes the abundance 
of synonyms, then the many characteristic Idioms and, 
certainly of minor importance, many tricks of spelling, — 
but not the spelling of such words as the famous three 
hundred words. Let us not forget that the foreigner — 
I do not speak of the hotel waiter — sees the English 
words before he hears them; and that makes all the 
difference. To him, the words are, for a long while, 
the printed letters on the page, and he has thus no other 
natural interest than that those words shall suggest as 
much as possible of their meaning and their Internal 
structure In their outer appearance. The more hints and 
signs there are to Indicate which is which, the more easily 
he will find his way In the wilderness. The more 
vividly the analogies, not of sound but of grammatical 



198 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

formation, are felt in the look of the words, the more 
quickly he will feel familiar among the strangers. 

Let us take an illustration referring to a large propor- 
tion of the three hundred words destined for mutilation. 
For the school-boy, who begins with the conjugation, 
nothing is easier than to learn that the ending " ed " in- 
dicates the participle. Nothing, perhaps, gives to the 
eye of the foreign reader such a feeling of safety. 
That is now gone ; the poor boy will have simply to learn 
by heart the sixty-two new verbs whose participle goes 
in future without this " ed "-ification. I hear whole classes 
reciting sadly, '' Exceptions from the rule of ' ed ' are 
addrest, affixt, blest, blusht, carest, chapt, clapt, dipt, 
comprest, confest, and so forth." And if the grammar 
copies its information from the Circular of the Spelling 
Board itself, those poor children will read the list of ex- 
ceptions in a paragraph which itself contains the parti- 
ciples spelled, mentioned, handicapped, ignored, and 
others which seem to them of the same order. There re- 
mains for them no other consolation than the thought that 
these are just " the exceptions,'* and that their Latin 
grammar has somewhat accustomed them to consider ex- 
ception as the legalized cruelty of grammarians ; but that 
such new punishments for foreign children should be in- 
vented in Madison Avenue, New York, would strike 
them as surprising. 

But even if after a few weeks' additional training the 
new exceptions are memorized in addition to the old ones, 
is it not still true that the foreigner has lost by this 



THE WORLD LANGUAGE 199 

change his possibility of quick and easy orientation in 
the seen sentence, — which alone was his purpose? He 
has not in mind a well pronounced sentence which he is 
trying to write down. Just the contrary: his pronuncia- 
tion remains for a long while so incorrect and poor that 
any caricature of spelling would be for him sufficiently 
phonetic. What he needs is to be able to recognize clearly 
the inner relations of the words on the printed page. 
That alone can attract the foreigner, and every difficulty 
In such a direction makes him shrink from the foreign 
idiom. But can we doubt that the alteration of the sixty- 
two participles works diametrically again his comfort? 
Kist is now to be written like list, prest like rest, discust 
like disgust. Even the obscuring words with a double 
meaning have been increased : mist is now mist and missed; 
past is now past and passed; and yet nowhere unity: 
wisht but not psht, winkt but not linkt. You could not 
make it worse for the foreigner; whether pleasant for the 
English-born, it Is not for me to utter an opinion. 

The vowels do not fare better than the consonants. Of 
course, the English child, who hears the simple sounds of 
though and through In the nursery and learns much later 
how to write them, may be Irritated by the complexity. 
But the foreign school-boy who sees words of that type 
has not the slightest difficulty with them. To learn how 
they are pronounced Is very easy because they stick In the 
Imagination just through their curious configuration: no 
German or French word looks like them — they are taken 
as Interesting freaks of language, which are the more Im- 



200 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

pressive on account of their very originality. Just so it 
was easy for us, in the geography lesson, to read the word 
" Worcester." Such grotesque abnormities are quite 
handy for the foreigner. Now he is suddenly to see the 
word tho written like who, and once again he loses a con- 
venient landmark In the printed sentence. But perhaps 
he is still more puzzled by thru, when he is required to 
speak it like shoe and true. And with the edict of the 
Board that clew become clue, queue become cue, and woe 
become wo, the helps for the eye are gone. You have 
only to write the three words to, two, and too simply tu, 
in harmony with thru, to make the phonetic victory com- 
plete. Is this a help to the foreigner who asks nothing 
but to see with ease the differences between the words? 

I started to speak only as a German, but at this point 
I am strongly reminded that I have not only a national- 
ity but also a profession; I feel inclined to add a word as 
a psychologist. If you want to bring about the under- 
standing of a written or spoken sentence, do not beheve 
that it is most quickly reached by a straight approach. In 
geometry it holds true that a straight line is the shortest 
way between two points ; in practical psychology it Is mostly 
not true. The natural language knows that, and always 
avoids the simplest means because they are not sufficient 
for our mental make-up; the mind needs helps and hints 
and side-lights, and the more complex the suggestions, the 
easier and firmer the grasp. 

The phoneticians habitually make here, in questions of 
writing, the same mistake which the inventors of artificial 



THE WORLD LANGUAGE 201 

languages have always made in questions of grammar. 
The heralds of Esperanto assure us, for example, that it 
is a defect of such badly manufactured languages as Greek 
and Latin, or German and English, that the same gram- 
matical relation has usually been expressed in various ways 
at the same time. For instance, when the substantive is 
in the plural form, It Is a ridiculous waste of human en- 
ergy, they say, to put the verb in the plural, too. If we 
say, " the child cries," and *' the children cry," we Indicate 
by two different methods that It is in one case one baby. 
In the other case several. If we change the verb, we may 
leave the substantive unchanged, or vice versa. The arti- 
ficial language, of course. Interdicts such foul play. Yet, 
while all this might be true for some Improved variety 
of beings, simple psychological experiments can prove that 
it does not hold for our particular brand of soul. One 
stimulus does not work easily enough with us ; we need a 
certain superfluity of suggestion. Otherwise, It would not 
be so difficult to read proof: we overlook the misprints 
because the wrong letter does not strike us, since a letter 
by Itself comes to our consciousness only by special effort. 
Every Individual letter is strengthened by Its neighbors. 
In the same way, every grammatical point must be brought 
out repeatedly, one hint must help another, and If two 
children cry we must say at least twice, in the substantive 
and in the verb, that It Is not one child. Otherwise, we 
should need an excessive strain of attention, such as the 
proof-reader needs for the scrutiny of his text, and reading 
and listening would become an exhausting labor. 



202 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

In just this way the written image may tell us much 
which seems logically superfluous since it brings out ele- 
ments of the word that cannot be pronounced, and which 
phonetic spelling seeks to abolish. But just as well might 
we propose to close one eye in reading, for the reason that 
the nervous processes in the second open eye and in the 
corresponding half of the brain are a shameful waste of 
neuron-activity. Indeed, we can read " just as well " with 
one eye, and hear with one ear; and yet nature knew bet- 
ter : this luxury is economy. Give us as many optical hints 
for the discrimination of the words as possible, and the 
more we apparently waste, the more we save. Simplicity 
and uniformity are the only, real waste, because they de- 
mand from us an amount of attention which is ruinous In 
its cumulation; they perhaps reduce the expense for print- 
er's ink ; but they increase neurasthenia among the millions 
of newspaper readers. 

And, quite by the way, is really nothing to be said for 
those sybarites who like to indulge in the luxury of super- 
fluous letters for the historical flavor they give the word, 
even where they are not needed for its easier grasping? 
Our simplifiers want us to write good-hy; but when the last 
good-bye has been spoken, will the simpler form still bring 
to our imagination the suggestion of '' God be with you "? 
And when fantom Is written like fan, and prolog like a 
king of log, and subpena as if it were ashamed of its Latin, 
and so on, do not most of the overtones disappear? 
Moreover, even these historical side-lights help toward 
quick discrimination; anything which stands for difference 



THE WORLD LANGUAGE 203 

will help to distinguish, and that alone Is the purpose. 
It may be easier to rush with an automobile through the 
American cities with their rectangular, parallel streets, 
one block exactly like another; but It Is certainly much 
easier to know at every moment where we are, in the 
picturesque, irregular streets of Europe, which show the 
growth of eventful centuries. If superfluous letters must 
go, why not, at least, begin where no such historical rem- 
iniscences are in the way ? It Is, for instance, well known 
that the g in foreign stands there without any historical 
justification; but It is just these perversities of spelling 
that our Spelling Board leaves unslmplified. 

Let us return to our Circular. We know its first para- 
graph appealing to the foreigner. The second paragraph 
changes the topic entirely; and yet, I am afraid. It Is the 
German again who is most nearly touched by the discus- 
sion. I thus feel justified In going on with my quotation 
of this first pronunclamento. The Circular continues as 
follows: "Apart from its relation to the foreigner, our 
intricate and disordered spelling also places a direct bur- 
den upon every native user of English. It wastes a large 
part of the time and effort given to the instruction of our 
children, keeping them, for example, from one to two 
years behind the school children of Germany and condemn- 
ing many of them to alleged illiteracy all their days." 

If this is the sign under which the reformers hope to 
win, I, for one, feel sure that their error turns here into 
a menace. The spirit of this statement contains a subtle 
but grave danger for our whole American school work. 



204 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

The consequences must become the more ruinous from the 
fact that some of the educational leaders belong to the 
Board and thus unconsciously add the weight of their au- 
thority to these misleading arguments. But my demurrer 
must not be misplaced. I subscribe, of course, with full 
conviction to the view that the American school children 
are from one to two years behind the school children of 
Germany. I should not hesitate to say even that the dif- 
ference may be more correctly called two to three years. 
But I deny absolutely that this has anything to do with 
the difference in the difficulty of spelling the native tongue. 
It is sufficient to consider the one fact that every German 
school child has to learn, not merely one method of writ- 
ing and reading the German language, but two ; he studies 
the international Latin printing and writing which the 
Germans share with the English, and at the same time the 
more difficult and more fatiguing so-called Gothic letters 
in written and printed form. The writing, especially, 
in two alphabets, with the difficult Gothic capitals, enor- 
mously multiplies the obstacles in the way of the little 
school child. If the Germans used only the Latin letters, 
the child would be surely half a year ahead of his present 
place in his other studies. Is it necessary to point to the 
further fact that the formation of sentences and the whole 
style in German is more complex and thus needs much 
more school training for correct expression ? 

Even the spelling is in many respects not less bewildering 
than that of English. It may be that the American who 
learns German Is less aware of the trickery in spelling, 



THE WORLD LANGUAGE 205 

for the same reasons which make the foreigner content 
with the English spelling. The American, too, sees the 
German words as soon as he hears them, and welcomes 
the optical differences between dir and tier and ihr, or be- 
tween er and leer and mehr, and so on. But for the Ger- 
man child who speaks the words first and knows their 
sounds to be the same, the difficulties of spelling arise in 
the school-room. It Is therefore utterly arbitrary to sug- 
gest that the burden of the American school child is 
heavier than that of the German; the double German 
script Is alone sufficient to put a much heavier weight on 
the young German shoulders. And yet those German 
children are, In spite of their harder work, one to two 
years ahead, as the Board confesses. 

The only logical conclusion Is that this delay In the ed- 
ucational development of the American school child rests 
on quite different grounds. It Is not difficult to find them. 
The explanation lies in the poorness of the average school 
instruction : the lack of thoroughness and mental discipline 
and accuracy In every subject. This is not the place to In- 
quire into the deeper causes of this fact. We cannot ask 
here how far the insufficient preparation of the school- 
teachers Is responsible ; how far wrong methods of Instruc- 
tion; how far the whole spirit of the country which en- 
courages and endorses this superficiality; or how far the 
carelessness and Indulgence of the parents Is to be blamed. 
But It Is certain that the lack of accuracy In spelling har- 
monizes completely with the lack of accuracy and of solid 
discipline in every other school subject. The blunders in 



2o6 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

spelling are more easily visible, but the '' illiteracy " in 
history, geography, and arithmetic is in no way less fre- 
quent. 

It is, of course, not inspiring that a doctor-candidate 
should have written to me last week about '' excepting " 
a position; but spelling is there in no worse case than all 
the other requisites of education. Are the Germans, per- 
haps, quicker at figures, or Is the American multiplication 
table also more difficult than the German ? In highly ed- 
ucated Cambridge are two telegraph offices in the shadow 
of the University. For years I have sent from them 
cablegrams to Germany; every word costs twenty-five 
cents, and nothing seems simpler than to reckon that four 
quarters make one dollar and eight quarters two dollars. 
Employees in those two offices have changed frequently, 
and yet I can report the exact fact that not only has no 
employee ever tried to calculate the price without paper 
and pencil, but that the result has been wrong two times 
out of three. The last time, the cablegram had nine 
words, and the young man calculated on paper that nine 
times twenty-five make one dollar and eighty-seven cents. 

And this inability of the large mass of American school 
children to do anything accurately goes on throughout 
the high schools and Into the colleges. It cannot be other- 
wise. Where the habit of strict mental discipline Is not 
acquired from the very first, intellectual disorderliness be- 
comes habit. The students may read much, may be in- 
dustrious, and may absorb immense quantities, but they 
do not master anything completely. Whoever feels an 



THE WORLD LANGUAGE 207 

earnest interest in American education ought to give to 
this lack of carefulness and discipline his most immediate 
attention; from that point alone can we reform and build 
up. There alone is the trouble which makes the Ameri- 
can school-boy two years behind the German : — because 
all careless and inaccurate learning is loose, inefficient, and 
time-wasting learning. The child must go scores of times 
over the same old ground, and the teacher must waste end- 
less energy and time with dreary repetitions, simply be- 
cause the child has not acquired from the start the ability 
to give full, concentrated attention to the material of 
study. If they had given to spelling and arithmetic only 
half the attention which they used to give to practical 
things, for instance to baseball, then the school children 
would stand well in line with the German children, and no 
spelling reform would be needed as a new scheme for 
coddling their lazy attention. 

But just because everything depends upon a growing 
public opinion in favor of stricter intellectual school dis- 
cipline, I call it a calamity that the Spelling Board takes 
advantage of the alarming state of the schools to spread 
the impression that the backwardness of American school 
children results from the difficulty of correct spelling. If 
this fairy tale becomes dogma, then every forward move- 
ment of serious educational progress is side-tracked again 
for a long while. Then there is no longer any one to 
blame; our women teachers are then splendidly prepared 
for their task; our school children are in the most excel- 
lent frame of mind for hard study; the parents make the 



2o8 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

most Ideal efforts to develop in the children the sense of 
duty and intellectual responsibility; and the only culprit 
is the treacherous dictionary-maker who does not write 
blest and bliisht : in short, all that is in future needed for 
the thoroughness of our school children Is that It shall be 
spelled just thoroness. 

Seriously, this wide-spread Inaccuracy demands the com- 
mon effort of the whole community, and not the slightest 
bit of this strength should be diverted. Instead of sincere 
concentrated effort, there comes one arbitrary scheme after 
another to captivate the attention of the public. For a 
while we heard the cry that the whole wrong arose only 
because the teachers did not know enough psychology. 
The public, justly anxious to improve the defective 
schools, rushed at once into the psychological track; the 
teachers became overfed with psychological pedagogics. 
The public felt proud that something was being done, and 
yet, the schools still remained backward. It could not be 
otherwise, because no psychology and no pedagogics can 
be a substitute for the first demand — that the teacher 
shall know the subject which she is to teach. And the 
chase In the wrong direction, of course, delayed progress 
in the right one. This time it is not the teacher but the 
pupil for whom the remedy is advertised. The pupil 
must have a simpler spelling-book; then everything will 
be all right, and the two years' difference from the Ger- 
man boy will be got over. I am afraid It will turn atten- 
tion again In a misleading direction, and the real evil will 
go on. And yet the children deserve something which is 



THE WORLD LANGUAGE 209 

more valuable for life than three hundred simphfied words 
down to wisky, wilful, woful, and wrapt; they deserve 
that the school shall give them a training in accurate 
methods of learning and thought. 

But let us hope that the school children are only brought 
in for stage effect. This seems the more probable inas- 
much as it is not quite easy to see how these three hundred 
changes can disburden the speller at all. For we hear very 
soon that, in the opinion of the Board, for most of these 
words both ways of spelling, the simplified and the cum- 
bersome one, have always been correct. You had always 
the moral right to put down both omelet and omelette, 
medieval and mediaval, program and programme, and so 
on. These were the fortunate words which could hardly 
be misspelled; since, on whichever side you fell, it was 
right. Thus the new prescription makes it harder, for 
the boy in future has a choice no longer, but must learn 
carefully to avoid that form which he finds in most books. 

Thus, I say, the children are only a side-issue, and the 
main point is that only the simplified English has hopes of 
becoming " the International language." We may return 
once more to this beautiful dream. Is there. Indeed, any 
prospect that English, reformed or unreformed, may be- 
come the language of the world? Of course, even the 
linguistic Anglomaniacs probably do not anticipate that 
the fifteen hundred other languages will be abolished, like 
slavery, and all humanity declared free to use the simpli- 
fied English. Eastern Asia will probably go on with 
Chinese, spoken to-day by four hundred millions, and with 



2IO AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

Japanese; South America will go on with Spanish; the 
hundred and twenty millions of Russia may go on with 
Russian; and even German, French, Italian, and the rest 
may still resist for a while, till they are classed with the 
languages of the cuneiform writings as extinct specimens. 
The only serious question, therefore, can be whether we 
may expect that the non-English-speaking civilized nations 
will agree to use English as the medium of international 
exchange. In that case the Americans would need Eng- 
lish only, while the Frenchmen would have to learn both 
French and English, and so forth. 

I am convinced that such a time will never come and 
that in spite of surface indications the chances for it were 
never worse ; every argument for simplified spelling which 
comes from these hopes seems to me, therefore, completely 
illusory. When the Volapiik people dreamt their short 
dream, and now, when the Esperanto phantasts have had 
their so-called international meetings, they have rested 
always In one fundamental creed which, they said, had the 
certainty of an axiom: that the political and economical 
situation of the civilized world makes it impossible for the 
living language of one country to become the international 
idiom of all others. And surely no one can attack the 
Esperanto movement as far as this self-evident principle 
Is concerned. 

Esperanto, to be sure, builds on this foundation an ut- 
terly unsafe structure, made up from all kinds of broken 
and crumbled and unshaped pieces, and calls It the temple 
of International language. The fact that It Is nobody's 



THE WORLD LANGUAGE 2ii 

language Is Its one true recommendation for becoming 
everybody's language; even though everybody must feel 
that such a lifeless, artificial syllable series makes no or- 
ganic words and sentences. It Is not and cannot be a 
language. Such a linguistic manufacture is at best a 
mechanical tool like short-hand, which might be useful for 
a few definite purposes, — especially If the manufacturers 
should succeed in mixing In their laboratory a word code 
having less the flavor of one particular group of languages 
than Esperanto. Esperanto Is, of course, essentially a 
mutilation of Spanish and French, and therefore sym- 
pathetic to the members of the French Academy, who rec- 
ommend It because they feel that Its International accept- 
ance would throw aside the rights of Teutonic linguistic in- 
stincts. 

The real mistake of the Esperanto Utopians is that 
they do not Inquire whether the necessity for one exclusive 
common language has any real existence. There is, per- 
haps, one field in which a linguistic uniformity must be 
desired: that of International law. But this monopoly 
belongs to French and can hardly be taken away : all the 
international treaties for a long time have been written 
in French, and their rendering Into another language 
would open endless and dangerous conflicts of interpreta- 
tion. There is no other field in which community of 
language is essential. In the international scientific 
congresses, which furnish the favorite argument for our 
reformers, hardly anyone takes part who Is not in any 
case obliged to follow scientific literature In at least the 



212 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

three languages of English, German, and French. In 
commercial relations, success has always come to him who 
masters the language of the customer; If a business house 
wants the trade of South America It is more natural to 
expect that one of its clerks will learn Spanish than that 
all Argentine and Brazil will learn Volapiik, a task about 
as interesting as that of acquiring the Cable Code. 

There remains, of course, the possibility that we travel; 
and that we feel it our duty to wander through Italy with- 
out condescending to learn Italian and to stroll through 
Paris without a word of French. Then Esperanto is to 
be our help and blessing. One of the leaders of the 
movement says : *' All that Is necessary is that in future 
every child in the civilized world shall learn in the primary 
school, besides his own native language, the vocabulary 
and grammer of Esperanto; then, finally, we may travel 
even through Roumania, and if a button comes off our 
coat, we can go into any shop on the street and ask the 
salesgirl, In Esperanto, for the button, and she will give, 
in Esperanto, the price of it." What a glorious perspec- 
tive! To be sure, there may be Americans who have 
discovered that even In Roumania a full pocket-book 
speaks a species of international language which is suffi- 
cient to buy any variety of buttons. And some others 
may think it perhaps a little out of proportion that the 
country boy in Ohio or Illinois, or In Russia or Spain or 
Roumania, who may never In his life leave his native 
land and may never in his life meet at home a foreign 
guest, should yet have to learn a second language in an- 



aeSK" 



THE WORLD LANGUAGE 213 

ticlpation of a stranger's losing a button. And if the 
American boy really wastes more than a year in largely 
unsuccessful attempts to learn the spelling of his own 
tongue : will he be delighted with the prospect of learning 
the intricacies of Esperanto, too, which offers only the 
one consolation — that you can learn it pretty quickly 
provided you master well your Latin, French, Italian, and 
Spanish? 

One other thing seems to the Esperantists not quite 
so familiar as it is to anyone who, like me, daily uses 
two languages. The real understanding hangs on the 
pronunciation, and this cannot be learned at will. I am 
afraid the Esperanto learned in the Nebraska country 
school might, after all, sound like Chinese to the sales- 
girl in the Roumanian department store; the pronuncia- 
tions would be too different. Many of my Harvard 
students can read German scientific books easily; but if 
they begin to quote, I have to ask them to translate the 
text into English; and while most of my colleagues are 
excellent German scholars, I know very few who pro- 
nounce my name correctly. On the other side, of course, 
the same condition prevails. Moreover, as is natural, 
an unusual foreign pronunciation is less well understood, 
the less educated the hearer. I remember that some years 
ago I spoke in a large American city before an audience 
of a thousand persons, mostly teachers. I spoke for an 
hour and a half without notes, and they listened so at- 
tentively that I felt quite happy in the thought that I had 
acquired a sufficient grasp of English to hold such a 



214 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

crowd on a difficult subject. But when I proudly left 
the hall and took a cab to go to my hotel, the driver 
absolutely could not understand where I wanted to go ; my 
foreign R, in speaking the name of the hotel, did not roll 
as he was accustomed to hear it. I had to write down 
the name of the hotel, and he looked with pity on the 
man who did not know any English. And so I always 
found it much easier to give addresses to teachers than 
to give addresses to cabmen; how can Esperanto help us 
in such a chaos of human labials and gutturals? 

But all the blunders of the patent-language inventors 
cannot justify us in denying that their fundamental creed 
is right; no living language can become to-day the vehicle 
of intercourse for the whole civilized world, and it is 
absurd to look for such a thing. The acceptance of any 
language, were it English or French or Spanish, German 
or Dutch, Russian or Japanese, would immediately not 
only crush the pride of the other nations but would give 
to the favored people such an enormous advantage in the 
control of the political world and such immeasurable 
preference in the world's market that no nation would 
consent to it before its downfall. 

For that reason I said that the chances were never 
worse; the spirit of strenuous, yet friendly rivalry between 
the nations in the markets of the world was never more 
wide-awake, and the feeling of national honor was never 
purer and nobler. The more the hopes for international 
arbitration become realized, the more they are eager and 



THE WORLD LANGUAGE 215 

ought to be eager to keep clear their own individuality, 
together with their own rights and duties, their own 
successes and responsibilities. Andrew Carnegie's liberal- 
ity may build a palace in The Hague in which a concert 
of the most enlightened nations speaks justice through 
its tribunal. But Andrew Carnegie has not the power 
to elevate his Simplified Spelling Board in Madison 
Avenue to the height of a tribunal far superior to any 
Hague Court: a tribunal which shall decide that English 
ought to become the one international language because 
the English-speaking nations have '^ the most progressive 
civihzation." And yet just that is proclaimed in the very 
second sentence which the Board has spoken to the world. 
Everyone probably agrees that mere richness of means 
and plenty of big things do not make up the progress of 
the world; the real progress lies in the advancement of 
knowledge, of morality, of art, of rehgion, of law, of 
literature. If the foreigner's learning of English really 
meant that he acknowledged the superiority of the Eng- 
lish-speaking nations in all these realms, the dream of the 
SimpHfying Board would come quickly to an awakening; 
national pride would justly put English on the blacklist. 
We should very soon have similar Boards in Paris and 
Berlin and so on. No argument can more retard the 
spreading of English, or of any other language, than that 
which insists that its mission Is to conquer the world. 
Might not the Germans say with justice that their progres- 
slveness from the days of Luther to the civic and scientific 



2i6 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

achievements of the present day, has been inferior to 
none, and that the language of Goethe and Schiller, of 
Kant and Bismark, must have the same ambition ? 

Or is the verdict of the Simplified Spelling Board per- 
haps only a late punishment for the Germans who some 
centuries ago ruined the English Spelling? The Board 
itself reports that the earliest printers in England were 
not Englishmen; mostly they were Germans or Dutch 
to whom English was a foreign language. They made, 
of course, blunders in setting up books in a language which 
they only half knew. The orginal editions of Eliza- 
bethan literature thus became " a marvel of typographic 
incompetency and of orthographic recklessness." And 
when the reaction brought an agreement for uniform 
spelling, it was achieved by the acceptance of the stand- 
ards set by the printers themselves. All that is certainly 
very bad. But first, even this does not prove that the 
Germans are less progressive; since they knew how to 
print at a time when the Englishmen did not. And 
further, the Simplified Spelling Board ought to be the 
last group of men to take vengeance, as without the in- 
competency and recklessness of those old German printers 
the whole Board might have nothing to do, and the quar- 
ters in Madison Avenue might stand empty. 

In truth, there is no hope and there is no need for a 
real international language, either an artificial or a living 
one. The times of long ago, when the scholarly men, at 
least, all spoke and wrote in Latin, cannot come back. 
There is to-day only one international language necessary 



THE WORLD LANGUAGE 217 

and possible; the language of good-will and peace and 
international friendship with the serious effort to under- 
stand the motives of our national neighbors and to respect 
their efforts. This language of good-will cannot be made 
less useful by any variety of dialects and pronunciations; 
one may express it in English, another in German, another 
in Russian or French or Japanese. Yes, this true inter- 
national language of good-will must spread more quickly, 
the more serious our effort to learn the foreign living 
languages; for the safest way to understand the spirit 
of another nation is by sharing the enjoyment of her 
finest literature. What is gained by an International 
word code which aids congresses and travelers and com- 
mercial clerks, if it decreases the number of those who 
can enjoy the language of Shakspeare and Goethe and 
Moliere and Dante? And it is not only the enjoyment 
of literature and the internal approach to the soul of a 
foreign nation, it is the incomparable gain from the study 
of the languages themselves which broadens our whole 
personality. 

The American boy who learns French or Italian or 
German up to the point where a real feeling for the 
language begins, must indeed perceive that his horizon 
becomes a new one. The German language perhaps ap- 
pears to him difficult at first; then the moment suddenly 
comes when he feels that a new manifoldness of inner 
movements has become living In his mind and has brought 
undreamt-of satisfactions. It Is like the experience of 
a traveler who has seen public buildings only in the classic 



21 8 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

column style, and who comes to Europe and beholds 
consciously for the first time the Gothic churches of 
France and England and Germany. He cannot stand 
before the dome of Cologne without feeling that there 
new energies awake in his mind. Never before has he 
seen these myriads of arcs and curves and figures, all 
harmoniously controlled by one great movement, toward 
the tower which points to heaven. This Gothic style is 
for him a new language of form, and he is enriched for 
his lifetime. Wonderful and complex like a Gothic 
cathedral is the dome of the German language, and yet 
dominated by that perfect harmony which bends the mul- 
titude into most wonderful unity. To deprive the youth 
of such beauties and to make them believe that it is nobler 
to demand a monopoly for one's own language is certainly 
not serving the progress of civilization at home. 

But whoever studies German besides his English will 
find there also, and just in its recent movements, how 
concerted effort can really improve and develop a 
language without the arbitrary methods of a Simplifica- 
tion Board. It is true that German spelling also has been 
reformed in recent years and that some changes have 
been introduced in the schools. I do not want to praise 
and I cannot even excuse every one of those German 
spelling reforms ; some of them seem arbitrary and poor. 
But the essential purpose was to make an end of the con- 
fusing doubleness in the spelling of many words. Where- 
ever, in the natural growth of writing, a variety of written 
forms develops together, the decision of competent men 



THE WORLD LANGUAGE 219 

can really help to unify public customs. As far as the 
American Board has aimed toward this goal, It has done 
what the Germans did with much success, and every 
reasonable man ought to support its efforts. If it decides 
for meter instead of metre and for labor instead of 
labour, it crystallizes the real tendencies ; and certainly no 
word of mine is directed against such useful endeavors. 
But that is not the essential work of the Board. So far 
there has never been in the writing of our time an un- 
certain hovering between thru and through, between blest 
and blessed, etc. The Board, instead of favoring one of 
two familiar ways, has closed the only known way and 
laid out a new one which seemed to it shorter. 

More than all, what Germany has achieved with still 
more success and yet almost without the notice of the 
foreign world, is the purification of its whole style and 
expression. In the first place, the clumsy words of Greek, 
Latin, and French origin are more and more being 
abohshed; private societies have turned pubhc opinion 
earnestly to this task, and success is even to-day beyond 
expectation. Further, sentences have become more lucid 
and less involved, the whole diction has become clearer, 
and the choice of words has become more characteristic. 
It can be said that the German of the best authors of 
to-day Is absolutely different from the German of twenty 
years ago; a new style has grown up through the per- 
sistent efforts of the nation, without any artificial prescrip- 
tion. Natural growth, and not mechanical construction, 
remains the life-condition for every element In languages. 



220 AMERICAN PROBLEMS 

But if the Americans begin to allow a Board to prescribe 
perfectly unusual methods of spelling for mere simplicity's 
sake, then there is no reason why a rival Board should not 
start to forbid certain cumbersome words and phrases, 
and prescribe a simplified grammar. Yes, as soon as, 
in spite of the Constitution, such matters can no longer 
be discussed, but must be discust, we cannot be sure that 
the rival boards may not presently form a word trust 
which will simply dictate which phrase-mills are to be 
allowed to run and which are to be closed: all for the 
higher profit of the world language which will ever re- 
main a phantasm, even if you are obedient and write it 
simplified, with an F. 



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